New Hard drive is missing space

[ZXR]

Hi,

I just bought a new Freecom 320Gb portable hard drive. When I plugged it in to my Win XP sp3 pc it showed as having 298Gb of space in one partition.
Although it had some install software,drivers and pdf files on these show as being 130Mb.
My question is where is the missing 22Gb of drive space?

Second question as I am using Win XP and the drive is formatted as Fat 32, is there a limit to how much of the drive sppace I can use? Is it 32Gb or less. Should I reformat to NTFS to get the most use out of the space on the drive?

[ChuckFickens]

Doesn't sound too far out to me.

There is two ways that people define a gigabyte, it is officially 1024Mb's but it can also be 1000Mb's. Obviously hard drive manufacturers use 1Gb = 1000mb when advertising their drives as it makes them look bigger but when you plug it into a computer that uses the correct 1Gb = 1024mb so you appear to lose a little space that way. (that would account for about 10gb of your missing space)

There is also some "overheads" in the formatting of the drive that would account for some more of your "missing space"

As for NTFS or FAT32... FAT32 can deal with partitions much larger than 32gb with no problems, it is an artificial limit written into windows that stops you formatting partitions over that size so just leave it as it is, you won't get any appreciable benefit from formatting in NTFS.

P.s. I just plugged a brand new 500Gb drive into my computer here to check and it was showing as having 465gb available space.

[legendis.god]

Im no techy but i had same with a flashrive

was supposed to be 8gb but was less due to software that was loaded on it.

No big problem really.

[Buenchico]

I'm rather 'out of my depth' with the second bit of your question but the 'missing' space is easily explained by the rather strange definitions of a 'thousand' used in the world of computers.

A kilobyte is (according to the strict meaning of 'kilo') 1000 bytes. However, because of the way that computers operate using binary code, it's more sensible to work with powers of 2. Since 2 to the power 10 is 1024, it's that number of bytes which is used by your PC to define a kilobyte, rather than 1000.

Following the 'strict' definition of a gigabyte would define it as consisting of 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes. However, the 'computer' definition is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. Manufacturers use the 'true' definition of a Gb but your PC applies the 'computer' definition. That means that a completely clean disk will only appear to have 93.13% of its nominal space. Which is why a 'true' 320Gb disk only has 298 'computer' gigabytes of space on it.

Chris

PS: This might help with second part of your question:
http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file _system.htm

[Buenchico]

I'm a slow typist, so Chuck's answer wasn't there when I posted.

Chuck has recognised that the difference between the two definitions of 'kilo' is the cause of the 'missing' space but he's incorrect to state that it only accounts for around 10Gb. That's because he's only used a multiplier of 1.024 for his calculation, rather than 1.024 cubed, which is necessary (as explained in my post above).

Chris

[fo3nix]

If you're just going to be using the drive with other Windows machines, format it to NTFS. It's better at handling large drive sizes than FAT32.

If you plan to use it with a Mac, stick to FAT32. FAT32 is more compatible with everything (NTFS is a secret Microsoft format).

[ZXR]

Thanks for your replies, I thought it may be something to do with that. It's just when you see a 22Gb discrepancy between what you have and what it says on the side of the hdd questions start to arise.