Noob Alert. . .re:HD size .. So Sorry!!

[Drew82]

ok you can laugh if you want, and im a bit embarrassed to ask but. . .

ive just bought a new laptop and it said 640gb HD.

However looking at it via my computer its says total size 583gb.

I know you lose some but is that correct?

Also, can I ask if I can play any FPS's on this laptop (at a decent rate)?

PB Tech - NBKTOS1550715 : TOSHIBA SatPro L650 i3-380M 2.53GHz 4GB 640GB 15.6" LED 1366x768 HD5145 512M DEDICATED VGA BT2.1 eSATA HDMI 802.11n DVDRW Win7 Professional 6Cell battery

Many thanks

 

[brookheather]

Hard drive manufacturers and Windows use different definitions of GB:

Gigabyte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Iccz]

ok you can laugh if you want, and im a bit embarrassed to ask but. . .

ive just bought a new laptop and it said 640gb HD.

However looking at it via my computer its says total size 583gb.

Fairly common problem, not one to laugh at either

GB does not equal GiB, basically windows is using Gigabytes instead of Gibibytes. What is the difference?
1 GB (Gigabyte) is 1,000,000,000 bytes
1 GiB (Gibibyte) is 1,073,741,824 bytes

What windows does is states that 1,073,741,824 bytes is 1 Gigabyte, which is of course incorrect and leads to a lot of confusion because the hard drive manufacturers correctly use GB on the drive. Windows should tell you that you have Gibibytes not Gigabytes.

I know it's covered in the link above but I thought I'd post here and condense it a little

 

[MarkE19]

What is also probably confusing you with the size is that you will have a recovery partition on the HDD that probably isn't included in the total size that Windows is showing. So a large portion of the missing 57Gb could be the recovery partition, with the rest being down to formatting a HDD taking up some capacity and the gigibyte/gigabyte differences.

Mark.

 

[EndlessWaves]

What windows does is states that 1,073,741,824 bytes is 1 Gigabyte, which is of course incorrect and leads to a lot of confusion because the hard drive manufacturers correctly use GB on the drive. Windows should tell you that you have Gibibytes not Gigabytes.

That's rather a one-sided statement

It'd be more balanced to say that they can both be considered correct. 2^30 has been the accepted definition of a gigabyte in most areas of computing for years and is the de facto standard but 10^9 is the usual definition of the giga- prefix for other units.

Although there has been a push lately by the IEC and CIPM to say you can't redefine SI prefixes for bases other than the normal base 10 and introduce the very silly sounding kibibyte, gibibyte and so on it's generally in very wide use.

 

[MarkE19]

That's rather a one-sided statement

I agree, which is why I didn't post it - please correct the quote to show that it was Iccz that made the statement rather than me.

Mark.

 

[EndlessWaves]

please correct the quote to show that it was Iccz that made the statement rather than me.

Sorry, must have deleted the wrong quote tag. Fixed now.

 

[Iccz]

That's rather a one-sided statement

Maybe so, but is it incorrect?

No.

 

[Drew82]

Hi everyone, thanks very much for the replies and info, its much appreciated.

Hopefully other people will also read this thread before they get a shock/confusion over HD size.

Thanks again