Missing HDD Space?

Hi guys, first post here.
Received my first notebook a few days ago, a HP DV6552ea which is specced as having a 160gb hard drive.
However some of this capacity seems to have gone missing as my Local Disk (C) drive is 140gb and the HP_RECOVERY partition is only 7gb.

I know I shouldn't expect to have all of the capacity available to me as the OS installation and recovery takes up some space but I would of thought that both would of added up to roughly 160gb but at the moment theres around 13gb missing.

Can anyone enlighten me on why this is please?

Many Thanks.

 

There is a difference between what windows sees and what the manufacturers say.

So a 160gb hard drive will only have about 147 actual usable space, 7 of that being taken by the partition.

 

Hard drives are never as high capacity as they market it to be; your 160 GB HDD may actually only be 155 GB in size.

For example, my hard drive is marketed as 80 GB, but in reality is only 74 GB.

 

160GB as sold by HDD company is 149GB as computer sees it, and this is not a Windows issue it is a fundemental of computer science and the difference between a base 2 and base 10 system.

 

The reason for that is that HDD manufacturers consider 1KB to be 1,000 bytes and 1 MB to be 1 million bytes when in reality there are 1,024 bytes in a KB, and 1024x1024 in a megabyte and so on. So when the manufacturer says 160GB thats 160 billion bytes, as opposed to the real amount. So whatever is advertised, take off around 7 percent and that is the real size of the drive.

 

All of the above answers are correct. 160GB is really 160 billion bytes, as the prefix "Giga" means 10^9. However, for some reason, OS manufacturers have decided to ignore the SI meaning of the prefix "Giga" and instead decided to base their measurements off of a base 2 system. Thus instead of using 10^3 (1000) for a kilo, they use 2^10 (1024). Thus 160,000,000,000 bytes (160GB) is only recognized by your OS as 149GB. Some of that is taken up by the formatting, so in your case your HDD only has 147GB of usable space.

 

Many thanks for explanations guys, very helpful.