[cargo0d]

Hello everyone,

I have just received a SATA Deskstar 7K1000.B that I purchased new from Tiger Direct. While formatting the partition into MS-DOS compliant and using Disk Utility on a Mac 1.24Ghz running OS X 10.4.11, I noticed that it took an unusually long time to complete the operation. Upon completion 233 Mbs remain unformatted. I also reformatted the same Hitachi into Mac OS X Extended with the same results...233 megabytes of unusable hard drive space.

I also own the 1st generation SATA Deskstar 7K1000 that formatted quite easily into MS_DOS leaving only 28 kilobytes unformatted.

Both drives were formatted and are used externally.

Why could this be? Is it possible that the 7K1000.B has 233 Mbs of bad sectors on it? I want to be confident that this is not a major issue, before I consider returning the drive.

Thank you for any help you can provide me.
Everyone have a great afternoon!

[Big Mac]

I wouldn't have given it a second thought because that sounds normal to me. The disk catalog takes a certain amount of space, and that space grows as the size of the disk itself grows. I don't think it's possible that a disk catalog could only be 28KB. Others can give you a more definitive answer, but I doubt there's a problem.