External USB 2 Drive?

Question

I have just bough a 500Gb external USB 2 drive, formatted it NTFS and ended up with only 465Gb useable space. Where has 35Gb gone and can some of it be reclaimed?Or is it the manufacturer (Maxtor) exaggerating the capacity?

Answer 1

465GB is the formatted capacity. The advertised capacity is always the non-formatted capacity because it makes the drive seem larger than it really is.

Answer 2

It has to do with how the math works out. An excerpt from the URL below:

[edit] Capacity measurements
The capacity of an HDD can be calculated by multiplying the number of cylinders by the number of heads by the number of sectors by the number of bytes/sector (most commonly 512). On ATA drives bigger than 8 gigabytes, the values are set to 16383 cylinder, 16 heads, 63 sectors for compatibility with older operating systems. It should be noted that the values for cylinder, head & sector reported by a modern drive are not the actual physical parameters since, amongst other things, with zone bit recording the number of sectors varies by zone.

Hard disk drive manufacturers specify disk capacity using the SI prefixes mega, giga, and tera and their abbreviations M, G and T, respectively. Byte is typically abbreviated B.

Operating systems frequently report capacity using the same abbreviations but with a binary interpretation. For instance, the prefix mega can also mean 220 (1,048,576), which is approximately 1,000,000. Similar usage has been applied to prefixes of greater magnitude. This results in a discrepancy between the disk manufacturer's stated capacity and what the system reports. The difference becomes much more noticeable in the multi-gigabyte range. 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

500GB is an estimate. You will never buy a hard drive that is exactly what the box said it should be. Kind of like when you buy processors, they don'r run at what they are rated at. The rating usually means thats the fastest clock speed recommended for safe usage.

Answer 4

Thats common.. since its in binary they usually round the numbers off...so don't expect to get the other 35Gb's

Answer 5

well if u formatted in fat u may got more than 465gb remaining 35gb is taken as physical memory