Reported Drive Capacities in Device Manager...

[stahlhart]

Was wondering if anyone else here has ever run into this.

Over the past couple of days, I decommissioned the last two mechanical drives in use here (apart from two ancient Pentium builds that spend most of their time in storage). All of the data, mostly Steam, EA and GOG libraries, was cloned over. Everything is happy and working, the old drives were removed... but now I've got this anomaly in the device tree; it seems to think that one of the two 4Tb drives is 2Tb. The drive capacities are being reported correctly everywhere else.

Is this any cause for concern, and/or is there a process to correct it? I know that I can delete devices and re-scan for them, but I'm somewhat hesitant to do that for a couple of drives it took the better part of two days to migrate data over to. Firmware on all of the drives is current.

 

[Steevo]

That label in device manager is just text, it doesn't have any bearing on the drives capacity, however I would run chldsk /r on the drive.

 

[eidairaman1]

That label in device manager is just text, it doesn't have any bearing on the drives capacity, however I would run chldsk /r on the drive.

Dism

 

[Dr. Dro]

Let me explain why do you see this disparity, Windows uses the binary scale (TiB) to report data capacity, but this is presented to the end user in the decimal scale (TB) that is used by hard disk manufacturers to market their products, creating a disparity that Microsoft never bothered to address. The value shown in Explorer is the size of the partition that Windows sees as the C: unit excluding the EFI system, recovery and boot partitions, the value you highlighted in the disk management console is the actual capacity of the drive accounting for all of its partitions.

2,000 GB is 1,863 GiB, 4,000 GB is 3,726 GiB.

All in all, the math is mathin' and Windows is being Windows.

 

[arbiter]

its been a thing like this for 30+ years. it hasn't changed it never will.

 

[Dr. Dro]

its been a thing like this for 30+ years. it hasn't changed it never will.

Nor does it have to... I just think that by now Microsoft should allow the user to toggle between mebibytes and megabytes, instead of just using the former and labeling it as the latter.

 

[Blue4130]

Let me explain why do you see this disparity, Windows uses the binary scale (TiB) to report data capacity, but this is presented to the end user in the decimal scale (TB) that is used by hard disk manufacturers to market their products, creating a disparity that Microsoft never bothered to address. The value shown in Explorer is the size of the partition that Windows sees as the C: unit excluding the EFI system, recovery and boot partitions, the value you highlighted in the disk management console is the actual capacity of the drive accounting for all of its partitions.

2,000 GB is 1,863 GiB, 4,000 GB is 3,726 GiB.

All in all, the math is mathin' and Windows is being Windows.

Re-read the original post. His problem isn't a TiB vs TB issie.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Re-read the original post. His problem isn't a TiB vs TB issie.

Spoiler

I explained both in my post, though?

The value in Explorer is just the size of the partition that is assigned to C, which should be the full capacity of the drive subtracted of around 0.85 GB in most cases

Aaaaah, I just realized, never mind. It seems that one of the drives being reported as 2 TB is in fact 4 TB? I am slow today

 

[nomdeplume]

Nor does it have to... I just think that by now Microsoft should allow the user to toggle between mebibytes and megabytes, instead of just using the former and labeling it as the latter.

Device Manager shows one of the drives is 2TB when it's an apparently functioning 4TB.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Device Manager shows one of the drives is 2TB when it's an apparently functioning 4TB.

Yes yes yes I just amended my post, 4 am and all that

@stahlhart What does diskpart show with these two commands?

Also try wmic diskdrive get model,serialNumber,size,mediaType

 

[nageme]

2TB for free, what's to complain about?

I'd figure out which specific drive it is, then see what info you get in HWiNFO.
Next, see how it's reported in another OS (Ubuntu LiveCD) or another computer.

 

[stahlhart]

The properties for the first drive in the tree, which I later found out happens to be drive D:, are shown.

Here is how I think it might have happened: my wife was having trouble with a 2Tb drive in her build that was randomly disappearing in the operating system -- she would open up Explorer and it would no longer be there, would just disappear without warning or explanation. Sometimes a reboot would bring it back. When the problem started getting worse, we removed the drive, thinking the drive was the problem. So, just to make sure that it was really the drive and not a motherboard or operating system issue, I put the same drive in this build, the one we're talking about in this thread, formatted it and let it run for a while. I put a Steam library on it and moved one of my games over just so that there would be some data on it. Never had a problem with it, drive worked just fine.

Some additional troubleshooting on her build revealed another problem: I noticed -- completely by accident -- that the 3V supply rail was in the red in BIOS. Reseated the PSU cables, that brought the rail back up to where it is supposed to be, and the problem with the drives dropping out has never returned.

(Segue to current thread discussion...)

When we got the two new 4Tb drives, to prepare for install them I moved the Steam game off of the 2Tb drive, shut the PC down and removed it, as it was in one of the two m.2 slots where the new drives were going to be installed. In retrospect, what I think I should have done was, before shutting down, gone into Diskpart and run a "clean" command on the 2Tb drive and left it in an unallocated state before removing it. It looks as though the Windows registry retains the drive information under the System key otherwise. Similarly, after the cloning was complete, I physically removed the two old spinner drives, and I probably should have done the same for those, as I still see them in the registry even though they are no longer physically there.

So this all comes down to sloppy administration on my part, unfortunately. I just wish that there was a way to clean that information up without the associated hardware being present.

 

[nageme]

Funny. So the hardware ID is correct, only the devmgmt label is wrong.

Not sure what causes it, but a possible fix:
In devmgmt, disable/reenable the drive.
If that doesn't help, maybe choose "uninstall" on the disk device, and then refresh/trigger "reinstall" (I guess no harm in doing that to a D: data-only drive).

 

[Steevo]

You could edit the registry but I don't recommend it unless you are OK reinstalling windows if something goes wrong. But you can change the names of almost all your devices if you want. My guess is somewhere along the way windows merged some registry values. There was a program called Ghostbuster that cleaned up the device section of the registry.

 

[stahlhart]

In response to posts here:

CHKDSK /R and DISM both ran successfully and did not report any anomalies.

Ghostbuster sees the drive the same way that Device Manager does, and it doesn't appear that it will make any changes to it since it's not highlighted as a
"ghost" entry. You can see the replaced two WD Black mechanical drives as "ghost" entries.

HWiNFO64 sees the drive capacities correctly.

I am more than likely just going to leave this be -- the OCD in me wants to see the drives reported correctly, but I'm not really up for risking a bricked operating system by editing device entries in the registry and screwing things up. To be honest, I seldom if ever look at Device Manager anyway, pretty much only in moments like this, and it doesn't looks like it's ever going to cause any trouble.

Thanks, everyone, for the feedback...

 

[nomdeplume]

Aaaaah, I just realized, never mind. It seems that one of the drives being reported as 2 TB is in fact 4 TB? I am slow today

It was hidden in the back with a lot of other highlighted information. Mix of 2TB/4TB and matching their orientation in all four windows took me a minute to resolve.

Here is how I think it might have happened: my wife was having trouble with a 2Tb drive in her build that was randomly disappearing in the operating system -- she would open up Explorer and it would no longer be there, would just disappear without warning or explanation. Sometimes a reboot would bring it back. When the problem started getting worse, we removed the drive, thinking the drive was the problem. So, just to make sure that it was really the drive and not a motherboard or operating system issue, I put the same drive in this build, the one we're talking about in this thread, formatted it and let it run for a while. I put a Steam library on it and moved one of my games over just so that there would be some data on it. Never had a problem with it, drive worked just fine.

All the convincing I need to see if this helps with my own drive disappearing issue you've been responding to.

 

[stahlhart]

It was hidden in the back with a lot of other highlighted information. Mix of 2TB/4TB and matching their orientation in all four windows took me a minute to resolve.

If it were possible, I would have awarded you a Steam achievement.