HDD is not showing full space

I just bought a WD Scorpio blue 750GB HDD to use as a 2nd hard drive in my laptop.

I put it in an external HDD USB case and did a quick format but its only showing 698.63GB under Computer Management?? Is the disk bad or am I doing something wrong?

 

The disk isn't bad and you're not doing anything wrong. It's just a matter of how manufacturers calculate the capacity vs how windows calculates the capacity, if you want to blame someone, blame the manufacturers' marketing departments.

I'm feeling too lazy to give a detailed explanation, but if you want it, i'll provide it.

 

Numbers explain the world:

Manufacturers (HDD and SSD) count 1 'GB' as 1000x1000x1000 or 1,000,000,000 instead of 1024x1024x1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

So, with 750,000,000,000 bytes divided by 1024, divided by 1024 and divided once more by 1024 we get the ~698GB that you see (and Windows correctly reports) we have available.


Simply: we get ~93% usable capacity of what the storage maker claims to sell to us.

If it weren't for the fact that they state this on the box/packaging; they're simply lying to us.

Hope this helped.

 

^plus some space is actually used for formatting. This, however, is almost negligible.

 

Got it now...thanks everyone!

 

You're welcome, pretty much all of us wondered where that space went at some point in time, i figured it out when i learned how numbers were represented in binary (yeah, i was too lazy to google it, so i never bothered with it until i learned that 1kB = 1024B and so on).

 

011000100111010101101110011000110110100000100000011011110110011000100000011010000110111101110010011100110110010100100000011100110110100001101001011101000010111000101110001011100010000001100001011011100110010000100000011001100110000101101100011100110110010100100000011000010110010001110110011001010111001001110100011010010111001101101001011011100110011100101110