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I bought 160G hard drive but it shows Gb only

Discussion in 'PC Hardware' started by piwolly, 2008/11/14.

  1. 2008/11/14
    piwolly

    piwolly Inactive Thread Starter

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    Today I bought a notebook. It said 160Gb on the offer list (bought it through a web mall).
    Now the windows shows the hard drive is 142Gb (150,080,557,568 bytes).

    My question: did the seller lie to me? or does the windows show the hard disk size this way?
     
    piwolly,
    #1
  2. 2008/11/14
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    All drives show this way...Windows and hard drive makers count bytes differently.
     
    Steve R Jones,
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  4. 2008/11/14
    piwolly

    piwolly Inactive Thread Starter

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    i understand that but why there is such a big difference. if there is 1-5Gb difference only then no problem, but hard to accept 160-->142
     
    piwolly,
    #3
  5. 2008/11/14
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    Decimal vs. Binary:
    For simplicity and consistency, hard drive manufacturers define a megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is a decimal (base 10) measurement and is the industry standard. However, certain system BIOSs, FDISK and Windows define a megabyte as 1,048,576 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes. Mac systems also use these values. These are binary (base 2) measurements.

    To Determine Decimal Capacity:
    A decimal capacity is determined by dividing the total number of bytes, by the number of bytes per gigabyte (1,000,000,000 using base 10).

    To Determine Binary Capacity:
    A binary capacity is determined by dividing the total number of bytes, by the number of bytes per gigabyte (1,073,741,824 using base 2).
     
    Steve R Jones,
    #4
  6. 2008/11/14
    CUISTech

    CUISTech Inactive

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    I also stumbled across this short article recently.

     
    CUISTech,
    #5
  7. 2008/11/14
    Rockster2U

    Rockster2U Geek Member

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    Its also quite possible that your laptop has a "hidden" recovery partition on it thereby reducing the size of the drive as you are currently viewing it.

    ;)
     
    Rockster2U,
    #6

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