just brought maxtor 320 gb external hard drive bad deal ???

Question

hi iv just brought a 320 gb from maplin and im pritty disenpointed there nuthing wrong the device accept.
its not 320 GB its a total space 298 with free space at 296
what should i do any way its takeing so long to move all my files to the external device by USB/firewire.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=115248&TabID=1&source=1&doy=21m9
have a look at that this is the one iv brought can i SUE them :)

no its total SIZE OF hard drive on windows is 298GB 22 GB missing !!!

Answer 1

After you lay a file system down on the hard drive, the usable space will be something less than what the hard drive vendor list. The file system requires dedicated space to maintain all the links to the raw data on the disk (pointers and file metadata - date, access controls, etc...).

As for the transfer rate, keep in mind that you have several points where things can slow down.
- Original source disk (RPM, cache, heads)
- USB/firewire device & drivers
- New disk (RPM, cache, heads)
The slowest point will negate any speed advantages of the others.

I'm sure if you open your case and check the disk label for your internal drive you'll see that it has less usable space than the label list (for example an 80GB disk will probably have closer to 76 GB of usable space after the file system is created).

If you truly want to have the full 320 GB, remove the file system from the disk and write an application that will manage the disk space from another location (see Veritas for their file system or even Oracle has their own ability to write to a raw disk - NOTE that in both cases, management of files will still require disk space on some other resource then).

Answer 2

You can't sue them. All HDD's do that. You never get the full space in a hard drive. And the speeds are normal.

From wikipedia
"For example, Microsoft Windows reports disk capacity both in decimal to 12 or more significant digits and with binary prefixes to 3 significant digits. Thus a disk specified by a disk manufacturer as a 30 GB disk might have its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as "30,065,098,568 bytes" and "28.0 GB" The disk manufacturer used the SI definition of "giga", 109 to arrive at 30 GB; however, because the utilities provided by Windows define a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes (230 bytes), the operating system reports capacity of the disk drive as 28.0 GB."

Answer 3

forget 320 gb hard drives . now youcan easily get 1 tetra byte external USB hard drives and it is better to buy 1TB as i bought 80 GB just 3 years ago which is become now redundant

Answer 4

The missing space is due to the software for the maxtor hard disk

Answer 5

Dude Ive got a maxtor 500gb and it gives me 500gb.
There must be a fault with yours or you've already transferred data ,it will not do it itself.
And with regard to self transferral of info it reallly isnt a hardship,you should of just brought a harddrive that downloads data when you turn on your pc if you were worried about doing it yourself, good waste of money for that service that can let you daonw as my old did.

Answer 6

cuando mi ordenador ha tenido un accidente no sabía si valía la pena cambiarle el hard disk o comprar otro nuevo, he tenido mucha suerte con amazon, he encontrado el producto perfecto, un transporte rápido y mi portátil funciona otra vez y mejor que antes porque el hard disk tiene una mejor velocidad de respuesta.