my computer says it 80gb but the 2 drive only add up to 66gb. please could some explain.?

Answer 1

A hard drive may say 80gb, but due to the way gigabytes are calculated in terms of bytes, it will not show up as 80gb. This is true with all hard drives.

Answer 2

The 80GB refers to the 'unformatted storage capacity'. It's based upon the amount of storage per square inch.

Formatting sets up borders and frameworks that take up room. The directory, virtual memory and housekeeping areas all take up room on the disk.

Also, 80GB will mean somewhere around 82,000,000,000 bytes. When this is converted down by dividing it by 1024 three times, it comes out to around 76.4GB. Your operating system will take up some of that room as well.

Now, if after all of that, and you have checked the system thoroughly and you still find about 2GB missing... your system may have a hidden partition containing recovery software. Should anything happen to your computer, you load a disk and it opens this secret partition and reinstalls the software from a disk image held in this secret partition.

This is how selling works.

In the same way that a company will guarantee low prices by offering a product at £29.99 when others are selling for £39.99 with free P&P.

You think you are getting a bargain but they haven't added VAT or inflated postage and this pushes it over £39.99 so you haven't actually saved any money...

Answer 3

The unformatted capacity of your hard drive is 80GB. The way hard drive sizes are determined differ from the way computers term GB. Hard drives, as in your case, would be listed as 80,000 (80 x 1,000MB). Computers, being based on the binary system, where only 0s and 1s are recognised would divide this 80,000 by 1,024 (Strictly speaking, there are 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte, 1,024 Kilobytes in a Megabyte, and 1,024 Megabytes in a Gigabyte, whereas computers, we are told, now use Mebibytes and Gibibytes).

As cookie has already stated, there may be a hidden partition on one of your drives for recovery purposes. (Is it actually a separate drive, or is it that the one drive is split into two partitions?)

This subsequently knocks down the hard drive capacity to 78.125GB. When it's formatted, some of that capacity gets used up by the File Allocation Table (FAT), New Technology Filing System (NTFS) or High Performance Filing System (HPFS), dependant on which Operating System you're using.

Sorry if you think you've been short-changed, but it's an acceptable business practice now, and has been for some years.

Answer 4

the computer can hold 80gb this is true but it only shows 66gb because that is the advisable amount of data to store otherwise your computer will slow down and freeze so it lists the amout that is advised

Answer 5

if this is a new computer with windows vista, this is normal. vista takes up about 20GB of space on its own and there are likely to be other preinstalled programs eg dvd software and antivirus. this happened with mine, i got a 120GB laptop from dell and it only had 90GB free when i got it! annoying, but completely normal.