Is it normal for a 200GB HD to show as 186GB?


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Well I am wondering if it is normal to have a 200GB HD show up as 186GB w/ Windows XP Installed?

It is an NTFS FS, and SP2 has yet to be installed (downloading it as I type this..)

I remember some people having problems of something simillar (if not the same) as this? Would this be fixed once SP2 Is installed? Or do I need to do something further?

Any insight is greatly appericated!

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Well I am wondering if it is normal to have a 200GB HD show up as 186GB w/ Windows XP Installed?

It is an NTFS FS, and SP2 has yet to be installed (downloading it as I type this..)

I remember some people having problems of something simillar (if not the same) as this? Would this be fixed once SP2 Is installed? Or do I need to do something further?

Any insight is greatly appericated!

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Do you have any programs installed or only just windows? If just windows then it is strange it only is supposed to take 10gs. :blink:

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Sounds about right...hard drive manufacturers use the 1000MB = 1GB scale while in reality 1024MB = 1GB, so you're going to lose some space. My 200GB drives both show up as 186GB.

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A real gb is 1073741824 bytes. They refer to a gb as 1000000000 bytes.

200,000,000 / 1073741824 = 0.18626.......

Note the .186

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It's normal because the hard disk manufacturer classifies 200GB as 1GB = 1000MB, whereas Windows XP classifies 1GB = 1024MB.

Might seem like a small difference, but it adds up, it's completely normal.

edit: JZolloXP beat me to it, I gave almost the exact same definition :pinch:

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Go to whomever website the HDD is from, and download the big drive enabler and run it... Should fix the problem. Also slap the HDD in another PC and see what it reads... If all is the same, then the HDD could be defective..

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Yup its normal and I find it annoying that they promote products as 200gb yet its only 186gb...

I have customers always wondering why its 186gb and not 200gb for instance.. bah! :p

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Yup its normal and I find it annoying that they promote products as 200gb yet its only 186gb...

I have customers always wondering why its 186gb and not 200gb for instance.. bah! :p

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It's not false advertising because it's the industry standard to have 1000MB = 1GB

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tb/...ty_measure.html

:yes:

my 120gb is just below 110gb of actual usable space. different filesystems show different capacities, but you never get the actual size advertised..

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It doesn't have much to do with Filesystems.

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I have a 160 gig hd w/ 2 partition (C and D). But they dont add up to 160. When I reformatted there's a 3rd partition on the list. Maybe its hidden or something and is used for recovery purposes? that may sound stupid....but I dont know...

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Hmmmm All my drives from 250G on down show normal cap minus the 8mb buffer....................... The big drive enabler just changes some registery settings to show what it should...

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I have a 160 gig hd w/ 2 partition (C and D).  But they dont add up to 160.  When I reformatted there's a 3rd partition on the list.  Maybe its hidden or something and is used for recovery purposes?  that may sound stupid....but I dont know...

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Some of it could be unpartitioned space, you should check out a program called Partition Magic, it will show you your drive and all the partitions that are on it, and from there you can fix it. You can also use the built in Disk Management feature in Windows XP, just right click on My computer, then goto manage, then goto disk management.

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My 250 GB HDD shows as 233GB, it's perfectly normal. One thing no one has mentioned is that the actual partitioning takes up some space...

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It doesn't, all the partitions are stored in the same, fixed-size, partition table.

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'much' is right, but it does have to do, however unnoticeable it might be.

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Well the only two things that the filesystem has to do with the space availible is how large the partition may be in total size (eg: FAT + FAT32), but it still doesn't affect how much space is availible... 2x 20GB FAT32 partitions will use exactly as many bytes as 1x 40GB FAT32 Partition.

The other thing is the 15MB or so overhead in the NTFS filesystem for each partition, but the 15MB overhead is in the actual partition so that it doesn't affect reported capacity, only useable capacity (which Windows doesn't not report, it just shows 15MB as used when there are not files on the drive)

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Well the only two things that the filesystem has to do with the space availible is how large the partition may be in total size (eg: FAT + FAT32), but it still doesn't affect how much space is availible... 2x 20GB FAT32 partitions will use exactly as many bytes as 1x 40GB FAT32 Partition.

The other thing is the 15MB or so overhead in the NTFS filesystem for each partition, but  the 15MB overhead is in the actual partition so that it doesn't affect reported capacity, only useable capacity (which Windows doesn't not report, it just shows 15MB as used when there are not files on the drive)

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thanks for breaking it down. (Y)

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Hmmmm  All my drives from 250G on down show normal cap minus the 8mb buffer....................... The big drive enabler just changes some registery settings to show what it should...

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yeah, dude... your messed up... the buffer doesnt affect the space avaliable for the hard drive... and no, your 250gb drives dont show up as 250gb

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Windows shows GiB as GB which is confusing cause its based on a 1KB = 1000Bytes thing iirc, whereas windows uses 1024bytes, so when it divides to show size, it looks like some is missing. HD makers use SI standards. It's a pain in the ass.

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