120gb to 98gb

[jojo100]

hi
anyone know why when u buy a hard drive say 120gb, when u install it, it says 98gb. im getting a 160gb and i know i won't get that much, but where does the extra space go, thats before u put anything on it,
ta for any help

[bongoboy]

A new 160gb drive won't be much smaller.
Anyway it's because gb's and bytes are different and they often quote bytes as it is the larger size.

160 GB will be 160,000,000,000 bytes so 160GB
But when they use the binary capacity of 1,073,724,841 bytes per GB it means your 160GB drive will be 149GB.
http://www.techzonez.com/forums/archive/index. php/t-7243.html

[wildwood]

The formatting of a HDD takes up soem space too, although a drop from 120 to 98 is quite a big drop. Usually a 10% drop is acceptable to allow for the setting up of sectors etc (formatting) so the HDD can be used by your computer.

[ACtheTROLL]

there eare quite a lot of reasons

Bongo is almost there
it's not bits and bytes (8 bits)
it's to do with how the numbers work
1K in the real world is 1000,
but because a comuter thinks in binary - the nearest whole number is 1024 - or 2.34% bigger which isn't much ... until you start talking in Gb
1 real Gb = 100000000
1 computer Gb = 1024000000
disc manufacturers quote 1000s ... but when you fit the disc to a PC - it calculates in 1024s
so 1000000000 becomes 976562000 (thats 22Mb) as soon as it's plugged in.

so your 160Gb disk will loose about 25 Gb

hardly worth it is it?

[fo3nix]

I had typed out a full answer to this but my browser swiped it.

There are a few reasons.

1) Manufacturers cheekily use decimal but your computer uses binary. So you lose space as AC and bongoboy says due to this.

2) Your drive must be formatted with a filesystem, so that files have addresses to them so your computer can find them quickly. These addresses take up a bit of space, so this as well as other filesystem features also take up a bit of space so that it's not available to you.

3) Sometimes the drive manufacturer will pre-format the drive and put a small partition on it containing some little free programs or something. You can see this either in My Computer or perhaps the admin drive editing system in control panel.

All 3 may contribute; the first 2 definitely.