Wester Digital External Harddrive says that only has 232 gb total but....

[King_Sprout]

It says on the boz that it is 250 gb. How do I fix this?

[RedvsBlue]

Dunk it in water

[ITDEFX]

can't fix this...you will always have less then the actual specs..so if you have a 250 mb hard drive, expect around what you said to have... Something to do with formating and the OS and other wierd shit... now if you were missing a good 100 gigs, I would return that immediatly.

[Oktoberfest]

I think Windows has like a different interpretation of how big a gigabyte is...

So yeah, all hard drives have a lower reading in Windows than it does on the box

I have a 200 GB which reads as 186 GB, and an 80 GB right now reading as 76 GB.

[Nogib]

It says on the boz that it is 250 gb. How do I fix this?

You don't because there is nothing wrong with it.

Hard drive manufacturers use base-10 to measure their hard drive sizes (i.e. 1GB = 1000000000 bytes). Unfortunately computers only speak in binary in which 1GB = 1073741824 bytes. So 250GB in base-10 is 232GB in binary. Simple as that.

[alonzomourning23]

I have a 250gb hard drive and it says the same thing. As others said, that's what it's supposed to say.

[Moxio]

You don't because there is nothing wrong with it.

Hard drive manufacturers use base-10 to measure their hard drive sizes (i.e. 1GB = 1000000000 bytes). Unfortunately computers only speak in binary in which 1GB = 1073741824 bytes. So 250GB in base-10 is 232GB in binary. Simple as that.

Damn, got it before I could. ;)

[ITDEFX]

lol too bad we can't go back to the store and say, i want my money back for the diffrence of usable space vs preformated space... whats the price of per gig these days?

[Vinny]

lol too bad we can't go back to the store and say, i want my money back for the diffrence of usable space vs preformated space... whats the price of per gig these days?

I think it's easy to get $.30/GB, especially with Seagate's perpendicular recording technology.

[King_Sprout]

I think it's easy to get $.30/GB, especially with Seagate's perpendicular recording technology.
Well I paid $100 for the 250 gb. And they were on sale. It's hard to get 30 cents per gb.

But eh, 40 cents is pretty close.

And thanks for the explanation person a few posst above. Didn't know that. So all of the measurements are wrong!!! I am not using 200 gb of the harddrive! I'm using more *cries*

[Moxio]

Not Bad for an external. Of course, you could get a $79.99 300 GB internal and get a $15-$20 casing and get 300 GB for the price of an external 250 GB. ;)

[HumanSnatcher]

You could always toss thermite on your entire PC. Then toss it on yourself. Not only will you save CAG from you, but the rest of the world as well

[Americanpierg]

Not Bad for an external. Of course, you could get a $79.99 300 GB internal and get a $15-$20 casing and get 300 GB for the price of an external 250 GB. ;)

where can i find this 79.99 300gb drive...? cheapest ones i can find are 320 drives from 100 dollars. hell i bought a raptor with 1/4 the space for 2x the price and, like 90% of the rest of the ordinary people out there who buys one, i dont even notice the difference. I bet its all psychological unless your very very tech savy. What a waste of money.

[SOSTrooper]

25 cents a GB is where it's considered a good deal. But more often you'll see deals between 25 cents and 30 cents a GB. I got the $79.99 300GB SATA HD from Fry's a few weeks ago. Not bad for no rebates required.

[Vinny]

I wish I had a Frys here... I have one near my college but the good deals always happen when I'm not there it seems.

I think the best HD deal I got was from TigerDirect. A 300GB Seagate + Ultra external w/ fan for $80 AR (including shipping). Not bad, especially when you consider the external HD.:)

[javeryh]

25 cents a GB is where it's considered a good deal. But more often you'll see deals between 25 cents and 30 cents a GB. I got the $79.99 300GB SATA HD from Fry's a few weeks ago. Not bad for no rebates required.

If only those prices translated to memory cards and mp3 players...

[ITDEFX]

mystery solved, thread close please :)

[Moxio]

25 cents a GB is where it's considered a good deal. But more often you'll see deals between 25 cents and 30 cents a GB. I got the $79.99 300GB SATA HD from Fry's a few weeks ago. Not bad for no rebates required.

Bingo. That's the 300 GB HD I was talking about.

[Americanpierg]

Bingo. That's the 300 GB HD I was talking about.

lol i finally saw this 300gb hd of urs...a maxtor? no thanx lol

[Moxio]

lol i finally saw this 300gb hd of urs...a maxtor? no thanx lol

My Maxtor has been going fine for about a couple years.

[arbiter]

The size discrepancy is due to how your filesystem formats a drive.
When Windows wants to find an area on your drive, it has to have formatted it into sectors. They're like addresses for certain areas on the hard drive platter. The problem is that you're always going to have some leftover space on the drive that won't make a full sector, so this space gets marked as inaccessible and is wasted. That's what you're seeing here. This is also why you may see two different identically sized drives that "lose" different amounts when formatted. They may have a different number or size of platters inside, and the space is lost on a per platter basis.

If you're using the Windows FAT32 filesystem, you can convert the disk to NTFS (NT File system) and sometimes that will reclaim a bit of the space. I believe NTFS uses a smaller sector size, or maybe just a different method of addressing the space, but it's slightly more efficient, and usually a little faster. Unless you need backward compatibility with Windows 95 or 98 on the same machine, you should be ok to run NTFS under XP.