Help with new drive, lots of space missing!

[frodo098]

I just got a new sata 320gb drive, it's one of those new perpendicular models. It seems like windows is recognizing the full capacity, but my actual partition is saying I only have or had 305gb(it's down to 298 now). I know you always lose some space doing the partition, but how can I get something closer to the whole 320gb?

[Sterling_Aug]

Buy a bigger drive.

The 320GB number is unpartitioned, unformatted capacity and it is not in real gigbyte numbers.

320,000,000 bytes is NOT 320GB. It is actually 312.5GB before partition and formatting.

How big is the recycle bin file? Windows normally set aside 10% if the entire drive for this. I normally lower the size to 5% or less.

How big is the swap file? That could be using up to 3GB of the hard drive itself.

[frodo098]

Yeah, I just looked at some more reviews of these drives, you're right. I probably will buy another one of these things though, they run great.

[G]

Also it may be using GB but you really see GiB.

Gibibyte (symbol GiB)
A unit of information storage equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes (1,024*1,024*1,024 equals a Gi). It was formally known as a binary gigabyte.
See: Bit Binary Digit, Byte and Gibi.

Giga (symbol G) – Latin: gigas, meaning giant
A multiplier indicating one billion (1,000,000,000, or 1.0*10^9) of some unit.

Gigabyte (symbol GB or Gb)
A multiplier indicating one billion (1,000,000,000, or 1.0*10^9) of some units. The binary giga (1,073,741, 824) is now referred to as a gibi.
See: Gibi, and Giga.

[Peter M]

Exactly. Drives are advertized in GB, while most programs show drive capacity in GiB (and nonetheless say "GB" anyway).

Now, 320 GB are 298 GiB.

Newt wrong with your drive. Next! ;)