I bought a hard disk that is supposed to be a certain size (say 4.0 GB), but FDISK or Windows Explorer only reports seeing a smaller number (say 3.8 GB), even though the disk is brand new and empty

I bought a hard disk that is supposed to be a certain size (say 4.0 GB), but FDISK or Windows Explorer only reports seeing a smaller number (say 3.8 GB), even though the disk is brand new and empty

Explanation: You bought and installed a hard disk but the system is seeing it as smaller than it actually is supposed to be.

Diagnosis: This is not really a problem at all, but actually a discrepancy in the way drive sizes are reported. Hard disk manufacturers use decimal megabytes (1,000,000 bytes) in their advertising, and BIOS auto-detect routines use the same measure. Other software, especially most disk setup and partitioning utilities like FDISK, use binary megabytes (1,048,576) in their reporting. The difference of about 5% is what you are seeing.

Recommendation:

Read the more complete discussion of binary and decimal storage measurements here.
See this reference table for a listing of the difference in size between decimal and binary measures.

Home - Search - Topics - Up

Not responsible for any loss resulting from the use of this site.
Please read the Site Guide before using this material.