External HDD Question.

[jason69uk]

How do i make the whole 120 GB size seen on 'My Computer' on a Western Digital External.

It only displays 111 GB.

Cheers

[Baldrick]

120GB is 111 GB computer GB.

HDD makers advertise HDD size as a DECIMAL number (1 GB = 1 000 000 000 Bytes) but the computer report on a binary basis (1GB = 1024*1024*1024 Bytes ).

120 000 000 000 Bytes / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 111 GB

[jason69uk]

aah right gotcha thanks for the info..

[jason69uk]

I converted the drive from FAT32 to NTFS doing it through DOS it came up with a wierd error and it could not continue.

It said the volume is dirty.

Anyway using Powerquest's Partition magic i successfully managed to convert it from FAT32 to NTSC with no hiccups.

What is 'Volume is dirty' What this mean?

Also when defragmenting it after copying 20 GB worth of files to it there were no poor performing files on there but it was all spread out in blue in different sections which is unusual for most of my drives because usually the whole area is blue and you got the unused space which is white, at the end of the blueness. Therefore with this external one its bits of blue with white in between on the graph shown.

Is it becuase it's external?

Thank you.