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80GB Maxtor drive only has 74GB
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Edmond, OK USA
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Can someone tell me why a brand new 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive only holds 74GB of data? I could understand in the old days when a 256 MB drive could only hold 240MB (drivers and such), but does the drive really need 6GB reserved storage? I did a reformat when I first bought the thing, but I didn't check to see if there is any unused space - maybe I will do that when I get home.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Dec 2000
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my 48 GB drive has only 44 GB available for use, so if that pattern follows, then 80 GB total with only 74 GB in reality doesn't sound out of the ordinary.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jun 2000
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I've observed roughly a 5% loss of advertised drive space.
Your drive actually contains 80 GB, but not usuable space. The drive manufacturers don't use the whole 2*10^x idea. They use the decimal way (i.e. 80, 000, 000 bytes, as opposed to the binary version.)
Sucks, eh? They should have to state the formatted capacity for a popular format, say FAT32 or something. It's tricky of them.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Dec 2000
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all the hard drive ads I've seen say the capacity (80 GB), then immediately say something like, "actual usable capacity will be less." They have their bases covered.
maybe you can exchange it for something larger.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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yeah, hard drive space is sort of like the old CRT argument: a 17" monitor doesn't necessarily mean a viewable area of 17".
i don't know how people got started determining HD space by NOT using the actual computer numerical values.
tr
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2001
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Originally posted by absmiths:
Can someone tell me why a brand new 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive only holds 74GB of data? I could understand in the old days when a 256 MB drive could only hold 240MB (drivers and such), but does the drive really need 6GB reserved storage? I did a reformat when I first bought the thing, but I didn't check to see if there is any unused space - maybe I will do that when I get home.
It's because of "the new math."
Note on the packaging, they'll say "Note, 1 gigabyte is 1 billion bytes."
Well, on a computer, a gigabyte is actually 1024^3, which is 1.073 billion bytes. So... their marketing figures are gonna be short on actual figures by 6% or so, which is what you're seeing.
Lame, but true. Memory makers aren't so lame -- a gig of ram is 1.073 billion bytes.
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