Quick Hard Disk question

[faramith]

Hi I bought my second Seagate 320 GB SATA 3 hard drive, and Windows detect it as 279GB and its formatting to that size, the weird thing is that the other identical HD was formatted before to 298GB, my main HD is a WD raptor, so these 2 are for backups and storage only. Can anyone tell me how to format the new one to 298gb? thanks

[aedipuss]

if the 2 drives are the same model, i can only think of 2 ways they are showing that much difference. either you somehow ended up with more than 1 partition or the drive has an extremely large number of bad sectors it locked out during low level formatting.

[faramith]

When I opened the computer management after installing the new HD it showed it as disc 0 279 GB, and it is formatting now to that capacity

[redwudz]

I have four 320 Seagate PATA drives and they all formated to 298GB. I would keep the sales receipt handy. 19GB is a fair amount to lose.

You might visit the Seagate site and see if they have some tools that might help: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

[faramith]

Thanks a lot

[faramith]

Ohoh the bios detects the drive as 300GB, and the seagate tools also detect it as a 300 GB drive even tho it has the same product code of the 320gb one

[Capmaster]

A 'true" gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. A "billion" bytes is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

When they want to sell you a hard disk, or a DVD blank, they use "gigabytes" when in reality it's billions of bytes.

To find out what the difference is, multiply the rated capacity of the drive (in their incorrect "gigabytes") by 73,741,824 and subtract that result from the advertised capacity.

A 320 "GB" drive is really (320,000,000,000)-(23,597,383,000) = 296.4GB

:P

[faramith]

A 'true" gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. A "billion" bytes is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

When they want to sell you a hard disk, or a DVD blank, they use "gigabytes" when in reality it's billions of bytes.

To find out what the difference is, multiply the rated capacity of the drive (in their incorrect "gigabytes") by 73,741,824 and subtract that result from the advertised capacity.

A 320 "GB" drive is really (320,000,000,000)-(23,597,383,000) = 296.4GB

:P

yes i understand, the thing is the Bios and the Seagate tools detect this hard drive as a 300GB one, it has the same product code as the other 320gb seagate but it still detects it as a 300gb one.
Old Seagate was formatted to 298GB new one to 279gb, there is somethign wrong here.

[anonjon]

I have both 300GB and a 320GB HDs. You got a 300GB drive. You need to take it in for a replacement.

[Capmaster]

yes i understand, the thing is the Bios and the Seagate tools detect this hard drive as a 300GB one, it has the same product code as the other 320gb seagate but it still detects it as a 300gb one.
Old Seagate was formatted to 298GB new one to 279gb, there is somethign wrong here.

My point was that a "320GB" drive will be actually about 296GB. The fact yours is 279 means you don't have a "320GB" drive, which is what anonjon said too.

Take it back

[ahhaa]

A 'true" gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. A "billion" bytes is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

When they want to sell you a hard disk, or a DVD blank, they use "gigabytes" when in reality it's billions of bytes.
:P

Cap- so we should be calling it a 'bigabyte'?

There is also a format setting for cluster size somewhere in the NTFS setup; could that change apparent size?

[Capmaster]

A 'true" gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. A "billion" bytes is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

When they want to sell you a hard disk, or a DVD blank, they use "gigabytes" when in reality it's billions of bytes.
:P

Cap- so we should be calling it a 'bigabyte'?

There is also a format setting for cluster size somewhere in the NTFS setup; could that change apparent size?

As good a name as any

The larger the hard disk, the larger the cluster sizes. But only when you get into extremely large disks.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q140365/

As you can see from the link, for all intents and purposes, your cluster size will be 4K regardless of your HD size, unless it's unusually small or large.

But the cluster size shouldn't negatively impact the reported size of the disk. It only determines how many small divisions are on the disk.

With a larger cluster size, a small file, like 100 bytes for example, will take up an entire cluster because the cluster is the smallest unit NTFS apportions for any chunk of data.

When you have very large cluster sizes, like 64KB, you end up with lots of clusters only being partially filled. That makes for more slack space on the disk.

What some people do is reduce the size of their clusters. But that has its drawbacks, too. Namely speed. I've read about people who aren't worried about total size, who bump up their cluster size to improve the speed. Your HD can locate one cluster among 1 million faster than one among one hundred million, for example.

The default of 4KB is probably a good size, and I wouldn't try changing it.

[Ron B]

I've got four of the 7200.10 320G Seagate drives. They all format out to 298G.
Excellent drives.

[Scorpion King]

I always use 64K on my video drives. 4K is ok on like C drive, but when the files are 4G+ each, 4K just doesn't make much sense to me. lol

[Capmaster]

I always use 64K on my video drives. 4K is ok on like C drive, but when the files are 4G+ each, 4K just doesn't make much sense to me. lol

That's an excellent plan, Your video drive is large files, and every cluster will be full. And it's faster than using a 4k cluster 8)