40GB hard drive shows is bios as 36.5GB?

Question

I have a 40GB hard drive that shows up as 36.5GB in the bios of my Dell C400 laptop. What can cause this to happen and how do I get the full 40GB?

Answer 1

Manufacturers often round up, or they calculate a GB as 1000MB which is not entirely accurate. Get the model number of you hard drive and look up the specs on the mfr website and I think you'll find that your BIOS is reporting the size correctly.

Answer 2

whodeyflya is correct. drive makers round up.

a kilobyte is usually thought of as 1000 bytes however a KB is actually 1024 bytes. multiply that discrepancy by 1000 and you'll find how far off a MB is compared to what most people assume. multiply that number by 1000 and the GB figures are way off.

36.5 is still plenty of room ... just consider it a 40 gig drive.

consider this ... 20GB worth of single spaced, type written pages would require a stack of paper nearly as tall as the former World Trade Center ... that's a lot of data

Answer 3

confusing stress manufacturers promote larger area than they actually grant. it truly is 40GB raw which comes out to be 40000000000 bytes. besides the undeniable fact that, a number of that area is utilized by technique of stress recommendations. the end result's that you get reported in reality 37GB quite of 40GB. it truly is stressful, yet it truly is what occurs. whinge to the producer if that bothers you, besides the undeniable fact that it truly is an identical with all manufacturers.

Answer 4

you can't. the harddrive has to organize the file sectors on the disc and you will always lose some space by formatting. For example a 250G HD will be about 234G after it is formatted.

Answer 5

they round up just like ipod's it says there is 30 gb but there is only 27.8 gigs the only way you could get more space is to delete programs you don't need

Answer 6

some of its allocated cuz it needs to be