Purchased laptop with 320 GB 7200 RPM HD, got 300 GB

is this normal? i got it from http://www.xoticpc.com and it was supposed to have 320 GB, but i only got 300 GB..

 

Shamelessly stolen from the internet -

Imagine a world where a "foot" was 12 inches to one person and 11 to another. The only thing common to the two people with yard sticks would be the size of the inch. Their yard sticks placed side to side would be different. There are two gigabytes, two megabytes, and two kilobytes, each meaning something slightly different then its counterpart. It so happens that 2 ^10th power is almost 1000 (it's 1024) and 2 ^20th power is almost 1 million (it's 1,048,576) and 2 ^30th power is almost 1 billion ( it's 1,073,741,824). A kilobyte is 1000 bytes to person counting in decimal and 1024 bytes to a person using the binary representations. The only thing common to the two measurement systems is the size of a byte.

Your operating system uses both binary and decimal representations of hard drive space depending on where you look. The hard drive manufacturers use the decimal representation. I've seen people complain that HD manufacturers are using the most beneficial numbers to rate their products, but I don't agree with this. If you use the decimal system you know exactly how many bytes your hard drive will hold without having to think about it. If you use the binary representation, you have to do a calculation to figure the exact number of bytes your hard drive will hold.

Let’s use the example of an 80 gigabyte hard drive. A typical 80 gig will have 80,048,390,144, but Windows will report that as 74.5GB in some places. If we calculate 80,048,390,144/1,048,576 we get roughly 74.55, (binary) gigabytes. A 160 GB drive would be 160,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 or 149.0116119 (binary) gigabytes. To get the values in (binary) megabytes simply divide by 1,048,576.

 

Yeah, what he said.

 

lol, now lets get an explanation in english

 

Yes it is correct.

basics are Overheads of sector formatting etc

Example is i have 2 Drives both 1TB made to look as one, for all us Junkies this is known as Raid 0 done for speed

as there both 1TB if you combine them you would expect to see 2tb ?

NO i only see approx 1.8 TB the rest is lost to the format Monster.

So in answer to your original question what you see is correct.

ted

 

Could be worse, does anybody remember hd floppy disks, 2.0mb unformated 1.44mb formated so you lost a 1/4 to the FAT

 

Hard drive manufacturers say that 1 gig= 1000MB, Windows says 1 gig = 1024MB.

 

Marketing ploys for the most part.
I prefer accuracy myself.

Why can't they simply put out a HDD or a storage that gives exactly just how much there is without any loss?

 

They have to store the FAT, file allocation table and other system settings somewhere, even SDHC memory cards and similar, say you have an 8gb card you might only have 7.4gb after formatting.

 

It's a bit of both, overhead and the marketing machine with 1000MB=1GB, which isn't really correct, but that's the way of things.

320 formats to 298

 

In all you sould only care when it is 95%+ used up and you are grunging for more space...................

 

You do *not* lose 0.2TB to formatting. You lose about 8MB, at most.

Manufacturers use base 10 for their advertisement (1000MB in a GB, 1000KB in a MB, etc) and operating systems use base 2 for capacity calculations (1024MB in a GB, 1024KB in a MB, etc). You got exactly what you paid for. 320,000,000,000 bytes ~= 300GB.

 

That's why I care right now heh thanks for explaining guys