How come the harddrive shows less space than there really is?

Question

I just bought a new 500GB hard drive to backup all of my other stuff, and when I installed it in my WindowsXP system, it's only showing 465GB. How do I get all of my 500GB?

Other info:
it's formatted in NTFS, I did enable it in BOIS.

Answer 1

this is a faq. it is due to the indication of size of hard drives by manufacturers and the OS.
a manufacturer denominate size in 1000MB per GB
the OS calculates with 1024MB per GB

as a rule of thumb you can calculate the showed size as indicated size by the manufacturer - 7%.

500 - (7*5) = 465 (the rule of thumb is correct!)

Answer 2

Computers run on binary numbering system ie
1Gb = 1024Mb = 1024*1024Kb = 1024*1024*1024b

Hard Drive vendors cheekily market their drive on the decimal numbering system - ie
1Gb = 1000Mb = 1000*1000Kb = 1000*1000*1000b

The other cheeky thing is that they market unformatted capacity. Formatting a disk will place marker data on the disk and reserve space for indexes and the like, so you lose capacity there also.

So if your computer computed space at 1000 rather than 1024 and you did not format the drive (and could not store any data, theoretically you would see 500Gb capacity.

Answer 3

The missing GB problem has to do with measurement systems. How many bytes in a gigabyte? According the metric system, it is 1 GigaByte * 1000 (MB) * 1000 (MB) * 1000 (B). Problem is, in computers, the binary system is used. That means 1 GigaByte * 1024 (MB) * 1024 (KB) * 1024 (B). So let's convert your 500 GB to GiB (the version in binary):

500 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 (here we have bytes) / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 465.66 GB. So you have all of your disk space. No worries.

Answer 4

You can't, you have to buy more than you want. It's stupid I know, but there are decimal and binary values for how many gbs it is, and they label it as the decimal number, so you buy a 500gb DECIMAL hard drive, but in binary it's only the number of bytes equal to 465gb.

Answer 5

everybody has an opinion in this subject count. i've got faith that maximum clientele with an 80 or 160GB rigidity could use the rigidity as one energetic partition. in case you have plans to have added working structures then greater advantageous than one partition may be mandatory. in case you as an occasion use 30GB for the O/S with the plan of loading purposes on yet another partition you would be forced to do custom installs of each and all of the purposes as by default the utility needs to place in on the C rigidity. As for keeping apart documents to different drives you are able to accomplish the same element with folders on a single partition. while you're in basic terms employing living house windows working equipment the NTFS record equipment is greater advantageous to FAT32 in terms of area utilization and record risk-free practices.

Answer 6

Hard drives are sold in decimal gigabytes (plain old billions of bytes), whereas computers deal with binary gigabytes.

500,000,000,000 bytes /1024 /1024 /1024 = 465.66 GB

Answer 7

The missing space is what was used by the OS. So its not really missing you already used it. :)

Answer 8

the extra is taken up by acual "window" and all the fonts, operating stuff... its never all the space on any computer

Answer 9

space is never exact, it could also be dedicated to something else in the computer.

Answer 10

The rest of your space is devoted to integrated programing, which is an INTEGRAL part of its programing. If you delete it, it will not work. period.