External Hard Drive...Help!

[vincent]

Just got an external hard drive 250Gb all plugged in,software loaded but only shows up as 232Gb on my laptop

File transfer no problem,only thing I have noticed is laptop is running FAT32 file system and hard drive is pre-formatted using NTFS.

Anyone got any ideas before I start making phone calls and embarrass myself?

Thanks for any advice

[Steppenwulf]

Quite often the actual capacity of a hard drive is substantially less than the advertised specification and an article on the web puts it this way-

Here is a quick reference to show the amount that the actual values differ compared to the advertised for each common referenced value:

Megabyte Difference = 48,576 Bytes
Gigabyte Difference = 73,741,824 Bytes
Terabyte Difference = 99,511,627,776 Bytes
Based on this, for each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly 70.3 MB of disk space. So, if a manufacturer advertises an 80 GB (80 billion bytes) hard drive, the actual disk space is around 74.5 GB of space, roughly 7% less than what they advertise.

Now, this isn't true for all the drives and storage media on the market. This is where consumers have to be careful. Most hard drives are reported based on the advertised values where a Gigabyte is one billion bytes. On the other hand, most flash media storage is based around the actual memory amounts. So a 512MB memory card has exactly 512 MB of data capacity, but this leads to the next area of reported space.

Based on the above a 250 Gb drive actually has a capacity of 232 Gb, which is what you have.

Clear as mud eh!

[Gary_M]

You never quite get what you pay for with hard drives. The directory structure takes up space and is a percentage of the overall capacity so the bigger the drive, the more bytes you lose. Mind you, 232GB is still a sh*t load of space

[S.T.Chapman]

Originally Posted by vincent

Just got an external hard drive 250Gb all plugged in,software loaded but only shows up as 232Gb on my laptop

File transfer no problem,only thing I have noticed is laptop is running FAT32 file system and hard drive is pre-formatted using NTFS.

Anyone got any ideas before I start making phone calls and embarrass myself?

Thanks for any advice

question are you running xp?
doesnt sound like it if your still in fat32
if not then if the and hd doesnt give any grief the leave it alone, if it does the reformat it.

[vincent]

Thanks guys

[Hawkeye]

Originally Posted by S.T.Chapman

question are you running xp?
doesnt sound like it if your still in fat32
if not then if the and hd doesnt give any grief the leave it alone, if it does the reformat it.

You can setup XP in FAT32 if you need to but NTFS is much better.You can also convert Fat32 to NTFS. Not 100% sure about XP home though

[S.T.Chapman]

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

You can setup XP in FAT32 if you need to but NTFS is much better.You can also convert Fat32 to NTFS. Not 100% sure about XP home though

Im aware of that but as most pc's are bundled preloaded xp they would be ntfs as the preferencial format.
which is why i questioned whether it was xp or not.

[vincent]

Originally Posted by S.T.Chapman

Im aware of that but as most pc's are bundled preloaded xp they would be ntfs as the preferencial format.
which is why i questioned whether it was xp or not.

Simon,Hawkeye,I am running XP Home 2002 with Service Pack 2. I had some trouble with the laptop last year and in my frustration decided to format the hard drive and when I reloaded Windows chose the option of Fat32,not for any particular reason.

[Hawkeye]

Originally Posted by S.T.Chapman

Im aware of that but as most pc's are bundled preloaded xp they would be ntfs as the preferencial format.
which is why i questioned whether it was xp or not.

I mentioned the FAT32 setup as i have used it that way on a spare drive to play old games.

[Ratbag]

Vince, sorry to hijack your thread but I am looking for a 120gb USB powered external hard drive and would appreciate any suggestions as to what make I should get.

So far I like the Western Digital Passport and the Freecom Classic Mobile.

Please post replies in plain English as I know sod all about computers, thanks!!