This question may have been asked before but iam struggleing a bit with this one so i thought i would ask all you pc experts.At present i have 2 x 120 gb hard drives hooked up which are not showing the correct size. Seagate st3120026a (showing as 111gb) Maxtor 6y120L0 (showing as 114gb) These are hooked up to my Asus A7V8X-X motherboard and iam running windows xp pro sp1.Does anyone have any advise as iam lead to believe that this is due to xp running the system by mega byte and driver suppliers format it as giga byte or something like that.Can anyone clear this up for me. Thanks John179
Your drives are fine. It's the manufacturer's listed size that's not accurate. Modern IDE drives refer to 1,000,000,000 Bytes as 1GB, but it's not. 1GB is actually 1,073,741,824 Bytes because computers use base2 numbering instead of base10 like you're used to. There's also a certain amount of space wasted when you format, so the useable size will be a little smaller. I'm not sure why the numbers would be different for the 2 drives, but I suspect you looked in 2 different places that gave you different units (ie GB vs KB). The actual size of a 120GB drive is about 114,440KB or 111GB.
Thanks for that guy's i guess it is down to the makers way of sizeing them.As when i go in to property's my drive's read like this Seagate 120,031,477,760 Bytes 111gb Maxtor 122,935,001,088 Bytes 114gb I guess in windows it is sized different to the way the makers size them. Cheers John179
