320GB External Hard Drive has only 298GB available??

Question

I know this is to be expected, but where did that other 32GB go? Is it being used for something? Do those GBs contain a copy of (back-up) of my little Dell 40GB internal hard drive?

If not, that's a lot of wasted GBs.

Answer 1

Manufacturer quotes in Gigabytes (decimal) ie 320,000,000,000 bytes.

320 gB in BINARY would be 343,597,383,680 bytes (320*1024*1024*1024)

Other way round, , 320GB (decimal) into binary gB would be 298.023 GB

So drive capacity reports absolutely correct

Answer 2

thats the binary value. nothing is missing.
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to elaborate:

hard drive manufacturers define 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while the rest of the computer world, including windows, defines it as 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. So a 320 billion byte drive is actually a little under 298GB. Some people point out that the official international standard defines the "G" of GB as one billion, not
1,073,741,824.

Correct though they are, using the binary value of GB
is so well established in the computer world that I consider using the decimal value of a billion to be deceptive marketing.

Answer 3

which gadget did you utilize to prep your force? basically in case - i take advantage of...actual click 'my workstation' - choose for cope with - in left pane choose for 'disk administration'. interior the backside actual window it exhibits your force with partitions. Do you spot a 20gig or so unpartitioned area? i might have used this gadget to chop up the 320gig into approximately 4 or 5 areas - yet thats me... The 6-7% loss isn't too poor...

Answer 4

I have the exact same hard drive. But i think its cause if you convert 298 gb to bytes you get something like 319 ..... etc. You get me, dont you ?

Answer 5

mark040477's answer and:
1.Writeback cache
2.Read ahead buffer.
3.Bits used to write the partition.
d:o)
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