Reclaim HDD Space

[cryptic1]

Hello Chaps

Got myself a 1TB Seagate yesterday . I also have a 320, 200 & 80 (IDE). So doing the math I should have 1.6TB, yes? Instead I lost a total of 109gigs, silly windows Linux on the other hand provides all available space.

Is there anyway I can reclaim this space? I'm aware that by default windows appropriates a certain percentage, but damn to lose 100gigs between four drives is just sad

As always thank you all in advance

 

[LFX]

1tb drive gives you 931gb storage
320gb drive gives you 298gb storage
80gb gives you 74gb storage
200gb gives you some 190? not sure coz thats an unconventional size

any way. you did not lose any space, its just the difference between 8 and 10 lol

 

[The_Techie]

Taken from the Hardware and Software FAQ:

Why doesn't my operating system detect my 160GB hard drive as 160GB in size?
Hard drive manufacturers define a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. A computer, since it uses binary, sees a Gibibyte (Giga Binary Byte) as 1,073,741,824 bytes. See this page for more information.

 

[LFX]

thank you techie for i could not be arsed explaining

 

[howardb]

What you can try in Windows is to disable the recycle bin on each drive (except for the boot drive - maybe reduce the size to minimal) - XP usually assigns between 10% and 12% to the recycle bin!

May help a bit, but won't help with the Gibibyte vs Gigabyte issue...

 

[LazyLion]

open up the drive and put some powerade in it. Then close it back up and plug it back in!

 

[Pilgrim]

Hello Chaps

Got myself a 1TB Seagate yesterday . I also have a 320, 200 & 80 (IDE). So doing the math I should have 1.6TB, yes? No Instead I lost a total of 109gigs, silly windows Linux on the other hand provides all available space.

Is there anyway I can reclaim this space? I'm aware that by default windows appropriates a certain percentage, but damn to lose 100gigs between four drives is just sad

As always thank you all in advance

This is not a Linux vs Windows, FAT32 vs NTFS vs EXT2 debate. This is hard drive manufacturers that inflate their numbers.

Right Click on one of your drives and have a look at the properties. I just checked my "160" GB drive. It has capacity of 164,693,536,768 bytes so the manufacturer claims 160GB but that number is wrong.

To find out how many kilobytes your drive is divide that number by 1024. For megabytes divide by 1024 again. Then for gigabytes divide by 1024 again.

My drive is:
160,833,532KB
157,064MB
153GB

I did not lose 7GB because of the operating system or the file system, I never had a 160GB drive. I have a 153GB drive.