A question regarding drive capacity.

[xby]

I have just purchased a 30 GB IDE hard drive, Maxtor's DiamondMax model # 33073H3.
The total capacity specified on the drive is 30.7 GB (GB defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes).

However, the drive specifications are detailed as follows:
Cylinders: 16383
Heads: 16
Sectors: 63

Assuming the standard 512 byte sectors, the result of the arithmetic multiplication is only 8 GB.

What is the explanation for this discrepancy. Non-standard sector size? Any other explanation?

[Mntsnow]

Sounds like your bios is not addressing the drive correctly.

Also the bios will figure the drive a 1024mb per gig or 1024b per mb instead of the manufacurers way of 1000mb per gig. so you lose atleast 24 megs per gig right off the top.

[xby]

My apology - I did not clarify in my original post that I did not install the drive yet. The data that I quoted are specified on the label on the case of the drive.

[xby]

I believe that I resolved this mystery after checking Maxtor's documentation on their website. It is my understanding that the drive actually contains 59556 cylinders, and that the figure of 16386 cylinders is intended for use with a BIOS that does not utilize autodetect.

[Mntsnow]

You are correct