160 gb hd only showing 147 gb

[jolted88]

Hi, I Bought a Western Digital 160 gb hard drive and after installing and formatting I partitioned it into 7 seperate drives, and for some reason it's only showing up as 147 gb. Any take on why this is? I'm running Windows xp pro..

[amb141]

Couple of reasons.

First, the formatting itself takes up some of your drive space. Second, a Kilobyte to the people who advertise hard drives is one thousand bytes (10 times 100). But, really, a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes (2 to the tenth power.) And so on. So a "Gigabyte" isn't really one billion bytes. Rather, it is 1,073,741,924 bytes (2 to the 30th power.) So, if the drive holds 160 billion bytes that is actually somewhat less than 160 GB.

My 120 billion byte Maxtor external hard drive (which is advertised as a 120 "GB" hard drive) actually holds ~111 GB once it is formatted. This is annoying -- and perhaps misleading -- but typical.

alan

[ogrrii]

[jolted88]

Thanks for your responses, but I think I'll go with the reply from amb141 seeing as how I have the latest bios upgrade. I'm really not going to complain about 13 gigs missing from 160 gigs. I also know that slack space is created with each partition.