Hard Drive Capacity Reading Wrong

[dwsnuk]

I bought a Sony Vaio notebook yesterday (VGN-N31Z) and all is going well except my computer isn't reading my hard drive capacity right. According to the box, the sticker on the notebook and the website I purchased it from, I should have a 120GB hard drive but when I view the Local Disk (C:) from 'Computer' it reads 102GB. What has happened to my other 18GBs? I could understand if it actually said 120GB and that 18GB was being taken up by programs, but it doesn't it only seems to recognise 102GB on my hard drive.

Please help!!!

[garwood]

Hi, I have a FE41E which is also suppose to have 120GB. I am running VISTA and have about 2.5GB of programs loaded. Also no photos or music on the machine and guess what my hard drive tells me I only have 70GB of free space remaining. Looking forward to comments and reasons.

[patrickbrans]

120GB is in industrial format (not formatted), and not coputer format so it's 120 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes
and if you devide it than 3 times by 1024 (formatted, see the difference 1000<-->1024) you get 111.75 GB (that's already 8.25GB difference)


Than there is also a hidden partition with the recovery on, wich takes the other 9GB so you come to 102GB.

So it's perfectly normal


About the othere one with only 70GB free from the approximate 102 (as explained above), a clean visat install allready takes up around 6-8GB (my own values I saw by looking at the windows map, everything else taking out of consideration).
Than you have your programms installed, but you say 2.5GB, but how did you measure that, because I can't be that little, only if it's a real clean install and you only loaded some little programms on it, as by default that map is also already taken some space by a fresh window install

So both cases sound perfectly logicall.

[davemee]

Patrick is spot on, while the rest of the computer industry works in increments of 1024 (1kb=1024b;1mb=1024kb;1gb=1024mb;etc) the hard disk manufacturers twigged they could make their drives look bigger by treatink 1kb as 1000b. Robbing you of 24 bytes per 1000 doesn't seem like much, until you are working at a million times that scale; then you notice your drive is actually 95% of the capacity it is sold at.

The OS has it's overheads too for storing files; even if your file is exactly 10kb, the computer needs to store somewhere what the file name is, which directory it's in, who owns it, when it was created, etc. All this information takes up further disk space, which you'll not see listed as 'in use', but still occupied disk space. 1000 files of 1kb each will use more disk space than 1 file 1000kb in length.

In addition, windows reserves some space as 'swap space' for running programmes to use as extra memory, and more space (=as much as your ram) if you use Hibernate.

HTH! at least you know *everyone* gets less disk space than they paid for.