# 320GB Hard drive turned 298GB after formatting



## WaXT (Jun 27, 2011)

GUYS I need your help so I have the Seagate 320GB HDD, then it got a few virus, and I already quarantined the virus using eset, then I formatted it, then after that it only has 298GB. I mean, WHY? I lost 22GB, and I assume that hard drive "system volume information" won't be as big as 1GB. But I don't get this one. Is there any way to get it back to 320?

this also happened when I formatted my hard drive for my laptop because it could not install windows 7 on my laptop so I tried to format it and then it went from 500 to 465. (QUITE ALLOT)


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## Maban (Jun 27, 2011)

This is perfectly normal and intentional. There is a 7.37% pseudo-overhead in capacity with hard drives. Manufacturers use 1,000,000,000 Bytes as one gigabyte while operating systems use 1,073,741,824 bytes as one gigabyte/gibibyte.


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## the54thvoid (Jun 27, 2011)

Maban said:


> ...Manufacturers use 1,000,000,000 Bytes as one gigabyte while operating systems use 1,073,741,824 bytes as one Gigabyte/gibibyte.



I take issue with your numeracy, could you be more exact please.


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## Arctucas (Jun 28, 2011)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte.

1GiB ≈ 1.074GB 

320GB ÷ 1.074 ≈ 298GiB.


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## jsfitz54 (Jun 28, 2011)

The non complicated way to determine capacity after formating is to subtract 7%.

So in your case: 320 - 7% = 297.6 approx.

      500 - 7% = 465.
     1000 - 7% = 930 and so on.

This is normal.  You have to format.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Jun 28, 2011)

What confuses me is he should have known it was 298 already, since you have to run it obviously to get viruses on it...


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## jsfitz54 (Jun 28, 2011)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> What confuses me is he should have known it was 298 already, since you have to run it obviously to get viruses on it...



Yes, I noticed this as well.

I suspect that is why the others gave the complicated explanations with the major math formulas.


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## WaXT (Jun 28, 2011)

Oh, so now I understand that this is normal, but is there a way to get those 22GB back? I installed windows 7 once on this 320HDD and it became 298. (2.5" HDD)


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## Maban (Jun 28, 2011)

You never had the other 22GB to begin with. There is nothing to get back.


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## Widjaja (Jun 28, 2011)

Yep regardless of the viruses which may have been in your system.
The volume size able to be used once the drive is formatted is 298GB.

The size of the overhead gets larger too.
My 2TB has 1.8TB available to use after formatting, not 2TB.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jun 28, 2011)

WaXT said:


> GUYS I need your help so I have the Seagate 320GB HDD, then it got a few virus, and I already quarantined the virus using eset, then I formatted it, then after that it only has 298GB. I mean, WHY? I lost 22GB, and I assume that hard drive "system volume information" won't be as big as 1GB. But I don't get this one. Is there any way to get it back to 320?
> 
> this also happened when I formatted my hard drive for my laptop because it could not install windows 7 on my laptop so I tried to format it and then it went from 500 to 465. (QUITE ALLOT)


Hard drive manufacturers go by gigabyte (1,000,000,000 or 10^9 bytes) and Microsoft goes by gibibyte (1,073,741,824 or 2^30 bytes).  Gigabyte is appropriately labeled with GB and Gibibyte is appropriately labeled with GiB.  Your drive has:
*320* *GB* / 1.073741824 = *298*.023223876953125 *GiB*

It has exactly how many bytes it should have.  Microsoft has labeled HDD capacities wrong since forever.




jsfitz54 said:


> The non complicated way to determine capacity after formating is to subtract 7%.
> 
> So in your case: 320 - 7% = 297.6 approx.
> 
> ...


The higher you go, the greater the difference. 1TB = 0.909 TiB or ~10% difference.




Widjaja said:


> The size of the overhead gets larger too.
> My 2TB has 1.8TB available to use after formatting, not 2TB.


*2 TB* / 1.099511627776 = *1.8*18989403545856475830078125 *TiB*

Nope, nothing to with "overhead," just Microsoft's incorrectly labeled units.


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## Mussels (Jun 28, 2011)

Maban said:


> You never had the other 22GB to begin with. There is nothing to get back.



^ that


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## theeldest (Jun 30, 2011)

It's like using canadian money in the US. You think something only cost 3 dollars so you pay with a 5 but you only get a dollar in change.

You didn't lose anything, they're just not equal units.

(damn, just checked the exchange rate. US money sucks)


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## St.Alia-Of-The-Knife (Jun 30, 2011)

lets say u buy a 500gb drive, you get like 450gb cuz the rest is for the MBR and stuff


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## microtrash (Jun 30, 2011)

FordGT90Concept said:


> It has exactly how many bytes it should have.  Microsoft has labeled HDD capacities wrong since forever.



Microsoft is not wrong. Disk manufacturer are. Long long time ago, at the time of sub-1GB hard drive (when I had a 100MB), disk where labeled with their true capacity, in base 2 (1024 bytes for 1 kbytes). Then, I can't remember exactly when, they decided to use base 10 for advertising disk capacity (1000 bytes for 1kbytes) just because... that make the disk appear bigger to the user (but not the system!!!)


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## Jetster (Jun 30, 2011)

Thats what she said  Sorry had too


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## WaXT (Jun 30, 2011)

lol. I laughed reading all these posts guys. Thank you all!  much appreciated. I never knew that I couldn't get it back. But someone said it's Microsoft's fault. What if I use OSX? would it be still like 298 GB?


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## Maban (Jun 30, 2011)

OSX (10.6 on) will report it as 320GB but that does not in any way mean you have more capacity. Mac is for the average user ie not tech savvy. They make it that way so people (no offense, but like you) won't complain that they are missing xxGB.


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## microtrash (Jun 30, 2011)

Since OS 10.6, you'll get 320GB. But earlier system still report 298GB.


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## boise49ers (Jun 30, 2011)

Wow what a thread


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## RejZoR (Jun 30, 2011)

Maban said:


> OSX (10.6 on) will report it as 320GB but that does not in any way mean you have more capacity. Mac is for the average user ie not tech savvy. They make it that way so people (no offense, but like you) won't complain that they are missing xxGB.



But quite frankyl some sort of regulators should press on storage media vendors to start marking devices with capacity based on 1024 bytes for kilobyte and not 1000 bytes for kilobyte. But no one seems to give a damn about it.


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## Maban (Jun 30, 2011)

Business is business. If you can get more money from less product, wouldn't you do the same?


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## FordGT90Concept (Jul 22, 2011)

microtrash said:


> Microsoft is not wrong. Disk manufacturer are. Long long time ago, at the time of sub-1GB hard drive (when I had a 100MB), disk where labeled with their true capacity, in base 2 (1024 bytes for 1 kbytes). Then, I can't remember exactly when, they decided to use base 10 for advertising disk capacity (1000 bytes for 1kbytes) just because... that make the disk appear bigger to the user (but not the system!!!)


I dug up a 500 MB drive a long time ago and checked it.  It was correct.  It had 500 MB, not 500 MiB.  I do believe I checked a 200 MB drive too.  No, Microsoft has screwed up and continues to screw up.  The only place where the industry (excluding Microsoft) uses base 2 is in RAM, not flash memory, not hard drives, not optical disks, not solid state drives, nothing.  Only RAM.  As such, Microsoft has their label correct in only one regard: when referring to RAM.

Frankly, which units are used doesn't matter so long as they are labeled correctly.  All OS's, except Windows, now correctly use GB and GiB where appropriate.  I bet the only reason why Microsoft hasn't fixed it is because Seagate sued and lost.  If Microsoft corrects their label, the people that sued Seagate are likely to go after Microsoft.  Microsoft made the mistake by not updating it, not Seagate.  Seagate's only error was in not clarifying that Microsoft's interpretation of "GB" is wrong.  Now everything from hard drives to optical disks have a disclaimer on their product stating "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes."  Microsoft is still wrong.

The reason why everything is base 10 is because, at the most fundamental levels, they aren't base 2.  For example, hard drives have clusters and sectors and every sector can only hold so many bits.  It makes more sense for them to operate on base 10 than base 2 because base 2 really means nothing to them.  It is a lot like comparing English measurements to SI--which is better depends on the circumstances.


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## Solaris17 (Jul 22, 2011)

st.alia-of-the-knife said:


> lets say u buy a 500gb drive, you get like 450gb cuz the rest is for the mbr and stuff



wat


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## Peter1986C (Jul 22, 2011)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I dug up a 500 MB drive a long time ago and checked it.  It was correct.  It had 500 MB, not 500 MiB.  I do believe I checked a 200 MB drive too.  No, Microsoft has screwed up and continues to screw up.  The only place where the industry (excluding Microsoft) uses base 2 is in RAM, not flash memory, not hard drives, not optical disks, not solid state drives, nothing.  Only RAM.  As such, Microsoft has their label correct in only one regard: when referring to RAM.
> 
> Frankly, which units are used doesn't matter so long as they are labeled correctly.  All OS's, except Windows, now correctly use GB and GiB where appropriate.  I bet the only reason why Microsoft hasn't fixed it is because Seagate sued and lost.  If Microsoft corrects their label, the people that sued Seagate are likely to go after Microsoft.  Microsoft made the mistake by not updating it, not Seagate.  Seagate's only error was in not clarifying that Microsoft's interpretation of "GB" is wrong.  Now everything from hard drives to optical disks have a disclaimer on their product stating "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes."  Microsoft is still wrong.
> 
> The reason why everything is base 10 is because, at the most fundamental levels, they aren't base 2.  For example, hard drives have clusters and sectors and every sector can only hold so many bits.  It makes more sense for them to operate on base 10 than base 2 because base 2 really means nothing to them.  It is a lot like comparing English measurements to SI--which is better depends on the circumstances.



Well written "essay" mate. I agree with you that it doesn't matter as long as the right label (using an "i" in between the letters in case of the SI version of the scale, e.g. MiB, TiB). Gparted is doing this actually, IIRC.


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## puma99dk| (Jul 22, 2011)

have someone forgot again that there go 1024kb to 1mb?


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## qubit (Jul 22, 2011)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I dug up a 500 MB drive a long time ago and checked it.  It was correct.  It had 500 MB, not 500 MiB.  I do believe I checked a 200 MB drive too.  No, Microsoft has screwed up and continues to screw up.  The only place where the industry (excluding Microsoft) uses base 2 is in RAM, not flash memory, not hard drives, not optical disks, not solid state drives, nothing.  Only RAM.  As such, Microsoft has their label correct in only one regard: when referring to RAM.
> 
> Frankly, which units are used doesn't matter so long as they are labeled correctly.  All OS's, except Windows, now correctly use GB and GiB where appropriate.  I bet the only reason why Microsoft hasn't fixed it is because Seagate sued and lost.  If Microsoft corrects their label, the people that sued Seagate are likely to go after Microsoft.  Microsoft made the mistake by not updating it, not Seagate.  Seagate's only error was in not clarifying that Microsoft's interpretation of "GB" is wrong.  Now everything from hard drives to optical disks have a disclaimer on their product stating "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes."  Microsoft is still wrong.
> 
> The reason why everything is base 10 is because, at the most fundamental levels, they aren't base 2.  For example, hard drives have clusters and sectors and every sector can only hold so many bits.  It makes more sense for them to operate on base 10 than base 2 because base 2 really means nothing to them.  It is a lot like comparing English measurements to SI--which is better depends on the circumstances.



This is flat out wrong. Computers work on base 2, so all capacity measurements should reflect that. All operating systems since the invention of the computer report HD capacity correctly in base 2 (powers of 2), Linux, Unix, Risc OS, whatever.

If Apple are now reporting HD capacity in base 10, then they're breaking the proper convention. Most likely so that their clueless users won't bleat about all the 'missing' capacity.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jul 22, 2011)

No, they did not report it correctly.  They were using the SI symbol ("GB") for gigabyte which explicitly means 1,000,000,000 bytes, yet they were calculating using 1,073,741,824.  There's absolutely no sense in that.  In fact, people should have gotten fired for it, but didn't.

Apple is reporting HD capacity correctly.  When they say GB, they mean GB.  When Microsoft says GB, they mean GiB.  Apple (and the rest of Linux) took IEC's new standards to heart which gets GiB off GB's back.  Microsoft is the odd one out.  We cannot tolerate double-standards.

So you really want to go to a store and ask for a 1.86 GiB USB flash stick when you could have just asked for 2 GB?  People just need to learn the difference like the difference between a meter and a kilometer and other people (read: Microsoft) needs to label their units correctly.  This is basic, basic stuff.


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