80GB Seagate Barracuda only showing 74GB

[rocketman]

i've just put an 80 gig seagate HDD new
in a new system i just put together and installed
windows XP pro it's only showing up as 74gig
its a brand new M/B with the BIOS updated
still only shows up as 74gig.
whats the go with that have i been ripped of by the guy in the
shop or has windows xp stolen it and useing it for some sinister world domination plot.
i did an online test through seagate they picked it up as 80.1 gig
so what gives?

[Disk_Contented]

If you mean it shows as 70 gig in windows, then thats probably correct. A portion of the drive is used to hold records of file allocation etc. It's normal for any drive to show less than its rated capacity when formatted.
If the drive shows as 80 gigs on the post screen, then that is the answer.

[viper]

I may have the solution to you problem...

It seems that some calculate 1000 MB as 1 GB, and some calculate 1024 MB as 1 GB.
I belive that Windows is calculating 1024 MB as 1 GB.
I had the same problem with my 40 GB disk. Windows is only showing around 36 or 37 GB

[Gabriel]

i hd the same prob with my 40gig maxtor when i got it. i was only getting 33gigs but i used fdisk and created 2 partitions and i picked up the whole 40 gigs. well not 40 gigs more like 39.8 gigs.!!

[curtybob]

D_C's right rocketman, think about a floppy disk. better yet get one out right now, and and insert it, if it is not a preformatted disk, it should show up as having 1.44 MB of free space, but format it and see what you get.

[encino1030]

All it is, is the different ways the drive manufacturer and windows calculates a Gb.
80 Gb drive to the manufacturer is 80,000,000,000 bytes.
however a true Gb is 1,073,741,824 bytes, so if you do the math you would see that 80,000,000,000 bytes is actually 74.5059 Gb.

Its just a numbers game used by the drive manufacturers, but you are not losing anything, just the difference in the numbers.