Harddrive Space

quick question regarding my 120x2 dv9500t

I understand that I'm losing 8gigs on a single harddrive, but I only have 111 on the second drive and on the first I only have 103. Is there a way to use the remainder of the space that isnt showing up... its about 20 gigs!

 

Well, a 120GB HD isn't really 120GB. When the hard drive manufacturers say 120GB they really mean 120,000,000,000 bytes which isn't 120GB, it's more like 111GB.

A real GB is 2^30 or 1024*1024*1024 which equals 1,073,741,824 bytes. This is how Windows counts a GB as well. So, a completely empty "120GB" HD will show as 111GB in Windows.

Hope this helps.

 

thankyou... so my drives are at full capacity... thats sneaky on the manufacturers end

 

Your first hard drive showing 103GB probably has the recovery disc partition on it unless you have done a clean install of vista on it . . . which will help you get some of thos GBs back.

Check out Orev's excellent clean install guide ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228/).

Worked great for me!

 

vista's system restore also takes up to 10-15% of a harddrives space. When i first got my notebook i installed somethings than unistalled them but my harddrive space stayed the same. I did that a lot the first couple days and saw that 15gbs were "missing". I found out that some "Shadow Copy" thing was the reason and the only way i found out to disable it and get my gb's back was to disable system restore. Its risky but it got my gb's back.

 

Yah, I'm familiar with the system restore and the recovery partition. I left them there just in case I misplace my restore dvds which wouldn't be very difficult.. especially in college. I've also done a clean install which helped me get a few gigs back from bloatware. Thank you all for your help.

 

Yeah, the hard drive size debacle is somewhat reminiscent of the old monitor size fallacy PRIOR to LCDs, which are measured accurately... Used to be that you'd buy a 17" CRT Monitor but it's actual diagonal dimension was 15.9", and for MANY YEARS little or NOTHING was said about it... Then folks finally starting catching on and enough of a fuss was raised that manufacturers started having to quote TWO screen sizes (the "original size" and the "viewable size")... Turned out the 17" monitors actually HAD a tube that was 17" wide at it's diagonal corners, BUT since the case enclosed part of those in order to hold them in and keep them from falling out the front, you lost a little more than an inch of potential viewing space, thus the 15.9" figure.

So my BRAND NEW Seagate Free Agent external "500 Gigabyte Drive," measured as 500,000,000,000 bytes is 465 GB as measured by my system, because it multiplies 1024 x 1024 x 1024 (= 1073741824) and divides that figure into 500,000,000,000, which results in 465,661,287,307.739... The VERY FIRST TIME I bought an extenal drive I was surprised to see it come up with less GB than I expected, but it wasn't long before I either figured it out (or someone explained it to me -- can't remember which, but I already KNEW that, just didn't think of it right away)... It's just a fact of life and one not likely to change any time soon, since it really IS 500 billion bytes, just not in standard binary format, which works in Base 2, rather than Base 10.

We live and we learn.

As for that 8 GB D: partition that's your system backup, if I were YOU, I'd NEVER delete that unless you just have NO CHOICE... That's just a good "last-ditch safety measure in 'virgin form'" to always keep like it was when you got the computer, in my opinion.
Jeff

P.S. If you're looking for good-quality EXPANSION storage and don't mind using an external, Best Buy has the Seagate Freeagent 120 GB portable drive that runs off the USB power that connects it to the computer on sale for $84.95 this week (it's "on sale" at Circuit City for $129.95, to give you an example of what a deal that is, with the 80 GB version at $89.95, still $5 more than BB is getting for the 120 GB one)... Even though my laptop is barely in the "build stage," I went ahead and picked one up so I can have a small, portable backup for it that will fit in my backpack when it comes... If you're planning to travel and use your laptop like a GPS, they ALSO have the GPS version of Microsoft Streets & Trips on for $79.95... I'd been expecting to pay more than $100 for that, so I ALSO picked THAT up.

 

On my 160GB drive, I was losing 20GB to system restore/shadow copy. You can change this, and I tuned it down to 4GB. There's some info at lifehacker on how to change how much it's using.

 

I think I WILL pick up that portable drive at BB. I was planning on getting one anyways but they were at $100 for a 120gig so I hesitated, I'll definitely go tonight though, its the deal I was waiting for, glad I waited.

I'll definitely survive without removing the partition, I'd much rather have it than not. And I'm familiar with the old monitor dispute. Somehow I neglected to come to the realization that they may do that with harddrives though even though I have bought internals before and they lacked a few gigs, bt I think considering I usually partition them into mltiple drives, I never did the math and noticed a significant difference.