Hard disc size

[silverknapper]

Hi I just bought a FZ21E

It says it has a 160Gb hard drive but when I right click the hard drive in my computer it says I only have 140 Gb.
Thanks in advance!

[Blencogo]

Hi silverknapper and welcome.

Unfortunately this is correct even though it sound like a fiddle! The hard drive manufacturer counts a kilobyte as 1,000 bytes but Windows only knows the binary system and counts a kilobyte as 1,024 bytes.

Your hard disc holds 160,000,000,000 bytes but Windows reads your disc as 149GB.

The remaining 9GB is your Hidden Recovery Partition which contains the software for you to recover your computer in the event of a major crash.

[Nobody-in-particular]

Hopefully the displaying of usable and actual hard drive capacity may now be more accurate thanks to a recent US law suit.

A law suit was brought to court in the US claiming the usable storage capacity of Seagate hard drives is actually 7% less than advertised. Seagate and most other hard disk manufacturers define a gigabyte as being one billion bytes, it was argued that this misled customers, as operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition, whereby 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes, a difference of approximately seven percent.

[Blencogo]

I believe Seagate won that case so don't expect too many changes.

[Nobody-in-particular]

I believe Seagate won that case so don't expect too many changes.

Where did you hear that Blencogo?

I have read that Seagate were still protesting there innocence but had settled out of court in order to avoid a potentially expensive court case and as part of the settlement have agreed to change the packaging and marketing of its hard drives to explain the difference in usable storage.

Also US customers who purchased a retail Seagate hard drive between March 22nd 2001 and September 26nd 2007 will be able to claim a 7% refund providing they have proof of purchase.

[Blencogo]

Apologies Kai-Zen, you are correct.

http://apcmag.com/7449/seagate_offers_cash_to_customers_for_missing_megabytes

Unfortunately the rebate is for Americans only and for drives bought through official Seagate retailers only.

[silverknapper]

Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated!!!

[Nobody-in-particular]

Although Blencogo answered your question I hope my input offered some useful information.