Anyone have this problem ??

[Wompratz]

To put it simply, formatting alone takes up some space on your drive...it's the same way my 10 gig Western Digital formats to 9.4 gigs. It's normal.

[darrelld]

Don't be surprised when windows reports it as even smaller.
I have a 14.4 that windows shows as 13.4

[Ed_S]

That's normal. Most drive manufacturers explain it in their installation instructions.

Here's (http://www.westerndigital.com/service/FAQ/general.html#capacity) WD's explanation.

There are two different definitions of a megabyte and a gigabyte. For simplicity and consistency, hard drive manufacturers define a megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, some BIOS's, Fdisk, and Windows Explorer all define a megabyte as 1,048,576 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes. This is also termed as a "binary meg" and a "binary gig."

Therefore, 1 meg = .95 binary meg

Ed

[MaMister]

Brought a fujitsu 8.4GB harddisk today and get it installed into my pc. Strange thing is when I boot up, I can see 8447MB. But when I get into fdisk. It only indicate 8056MB. Why ?? How to get the rest of the space back ??

[Colt357@LA]

think of it as the space waste in margins in your documents, it takes up roughly 5% of claimed capacity

[MrYozo]

Hi everybody, I make myself that question just a couple of years ago....that's some tricky, because in a half, as ED_S said, manufacturers are tricky with their commercial explanations (because of his definition of a theorical Mb ), but in the other half, there's a amount of Mb that are employed into the hard disk's structuration process ( partitions&format ). So when you format your drive, your total physical capacity of your hard disk ( that the maufacturer has set to this product ) reduces some significant amount of Mb. So, that format process, structure hard disk surface (physical structure that allow N Mb) into a set of tracks, sectors, faces @ cilynders that forms, in fact, a really map of where your information could be placed & located (physical structure is converted into a logical structure that allow N-x Mb). In that case X is a factor that depends in the amount of information that the hard disk needs to structure that surface ( it depends in different Operative Systems that use different file systems). But, generally, the bigger the physical structure, the bigger the amount of MB needed to store the lógical structure, depending on the size of each minimal logical structure. That's my opinion.

[NDC]

The larger the partiton you make, the larger the loss of MB after formatting the drive. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif