Lost space on my hard drive
This is a discussion about Lost space on my hard drive in the Customization Tweaking category; When I configured my 10. 2Gig Western Digital Hard disk to NTFS, as a secondary hard drive ( to store data only) why did the total disk space become 9878 MB?? Please help. Thanks in advance. Abhijit.
When I configured my 10.2Gig Western Digital Hard disk to NTFS, as a secondary hard drive ( to store data only) why did the total disk space become 9878 MB??
Please help.
Thanks in advance.
Abhijit
Please help.
Thanks in advance.
Abhijit
Participate in our website and join the conversation
This subject has been archived. New comments and votes cannot be submitted.
Aug 8
Aug 24
0
1 minute
Responses to this topic
That has to do with the fact that hard drive manufacturers calculate 1 gig = 10^9 bytes, whereas windows calculates it in powers of 2
1 kB = 2^10 = 1024 bytes
1 mB = 2^20 = 1048576 bytes
1 gB = 2^30 = 1073741824 bytes
So your 10.2 gig hard drive really has 10,200,000,000 bytes, whereas windows would only call it 10.2 gig if it had ~10,952,166,605 bytes
1 kB = 2^10 = 1024 bytes
1 mB = 2^20 = 1048576 bytes
1 gB = 2^30 = 1073741824 bytes
So your 10.2 gig hard drive really has 10,200,000,000 bytes, whereas windows would only call it 10.2 gig if it had ~10,952,166,605 bytes
Also, NTFS has a massive overhead compared to FAT.
When you format a disk using FAT, a few KB are reserved for File Allocation Tables and stuff like that.
With NTFS, you need around 5MB to store that information. That's the main reason you can't format floppy disks using NTFS. The basic file structure is just too big to fit.
When you format a disk using FAT, a few KB are reserved for File Allocation Tables and stuff like that.
With NTFS, you need around 5MB to store that information. That's the main reason you can't format floppy disks using NTFS. The basic file structure is just too big to fit.
