Hard Drive Question re size

[RobsterD]

Just in the process of installing a couple of "Samsung SpinPoint P80 SP1614N" hard drives and haven't found any info on the Samsung web site re installation.
The drive is a 160g and this is showing as 160g in the bios, detection etc is set to auto on a Asus A7N8X Deluxe V2 board which I beleive supports 48 bit LBA.
When I access the drives in disk manager the drive is only showing as 149Gb,is this correct as I said cant find any info re spec from Samsung.
I've enabled 48bit working with the registry hack from Microsoft KnowledgeBase article 303013 which enables support for HD greater than 137Gb.
So any ideas why I'm only seeing 149Gb.
Cheers
Rob

[Bursar]

It's probably about right.

Disc manufacturers have a habit of rounding their numbers (and generally say that 1GB=1,000,000,000 Bytes and so-on). By the time you take the rounding into account, and the fact you lose some space during formatting, you'll probably find that being 11GB down is quite normal!

[loonatic]

Just guessing but I'd say that the quoted capacity of 160GB is it's unformatted size and then depending on which file system you format the drive with will determine it's usable size.

As an example I have a 40GB drive here formated with NTFS and it's reported size is only 38.1GB.

Cheers, Lee

[triplebj]

I have a few of those great drives, and they also show up as 149GB. As the others said, it's all in the formatting and 1024^3 vs. 10^9 calculations....

Enjoy the drive ! (you definitely won't hear it )

/BJ

[RobsterD]

I suspected that was the case,thanks for confirming.
Rob

[JohnG]

Where did you buy the Samsung disks from ? I've drawn a blank with my usual suppliers

[InsertNameHere]

Yeah, that’s looks about right. Manufacturers rate the capacity of their drives in decimal units (or to the base 10). However, since a computer works on binary, the capacity of the drive can appear slightly lower.

If we take the stated capacity (160GB) and break it down into bytes, we get:

GB 160
MB 160,000
KB 160,000,000
Bytes 160,000,000,000

We can then work backwards (taking 1 Kibibyte = 1024 bytes, 1 Mebibyte = 1024 Kibibytes, etc), to achieve the following:

Bytes 160,000,000,000
KiB 156,250,000
MiB 152,587.890625
GiB 149.011611938476

So as you can see, all is fine mate . Its just a case of filling it now...

Alex

[RobsterD]

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?a...rpID=1&cks=PRl
Got them on a special @ £83
Nother quick question,I ghosted my 40g drive to the 160g which took about 20mins,didn't format or prepare disk before ghosting,I then formatted the 2nd 160g which took alot longer than 20 mins.Does the process of ghosting to larger disks format the whole drive or will I run into problems when I reach or pass 40 g on the new drive,
Cheers
Rob

[mephistopheles]

Beats me how an unformatted drive was visible in the first place.