Incorrect Disk Space...
 

Bit of a n00b question but what can i do when my PC is reporting the wrong amount of diskspace i have.

Its a 120gb hard drive but in the control panel it only reports 111gb....

Will i have to go into the BIOS and change some things?

Help appreciated!! loney:

That's a normal reading, I assume....My harddrives never have the same amount of space when they're installed as they do advertised.

I'm not sure why, maybe they round the amount of megabytes upwards,
someone that is teh brains can hopefully answer this query...... oOo:

Thats fine - im not sure on the exact details but there is always lost space on hdd's.

This is justa common bug that happens a number of ways, depending on the OS the system manager will ignore some of the system files, the harddrive could be petitioned, backup files are usually ignore by some OS's also fragmentation of the drive(s). defraging the drive should help, but its nothing to worry about.

Re: Incorrect Disk Space...
 

[quote="mr.miyagi":bcf1d]Bit of a n00b question but what can i do when my PC is reporting the wrong amount of diskspace i have.

Its a 120gb hard drive but in the control panel it only reports 111gb....

Will i have to go into the BIOS and change some things?

Help appreciated!! loney:[/quote:bcf1d]


Hard drive manufacturers define a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. I'm not sure why they do this, I guess it's just a nice round number to work with. Anyway, the binary value for 1GB - which is the value your BIOS and operating system understand - is 1,073,741,824 bytes. So when you buy a new hard drive in the future, divide its advertised GB size by 1,073,741,824 and that'll give you the real space available on the drive.

In your case - 120,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 111,758,708,953 bytes

dance:

Re: Incorrect Disk Space...
 

[quote="Mr.Buttocks":34b35]


Hard drive manufacturers define a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. I'm not sure why they do this... [/quote:34b35]
They do this cuz its the literal meaning og the prefix Giga =1 billion or 10^9 so its 1 billion bytes instead of taking the time and space, which is money, and doing the actual conversion over

Re: Incorrect Disk Space...
 

[quote=Sniper101]They do this cuz its the literal meaning og the prefix Giga[/quote:b8e30]

Of course! wallbash:


I remember reading about a bunch of people that were going to take legal action against hard-drive manufacturers for, as they saw it, misleading advertising. It was a couple of years ago......I guess nothing ever came of it. hake:

no cuz obviously they still do it, then again motherboard maunfacturers do nothing to correct how their BIOS reads a Gig oOo: so you can blame both i guess. but also you could blame the guy who defined a kilobyte as 1024 bytes. which is the real root of the problem

Also the maufacturing of HD's isnt perfect so you get some "wasted sectors" that cant be written to.

Thanks dudez, I can sleep soundly now cool:

i know how to check the amount of ram i have but how do i find out how big my HD is?

[quote="Crazy Canadian":0d744]i know how to check the amount of ram i have but how do i find out how big my HD is?[/quote:0d744]

Erm, can't you open up My Computer and hover your mouse over the C: drive icon? it'll tell you how much is free and used, or you could right click it and hit properties

open my computer right click on the drive and properties