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General discussion

system not showing true HD size

Aug 10, 2004 3:44PM PDT

I have Win XP Pro, Intel Pent III 800, and installed a 160GB Western Digital HD. I partitioned it into 4 drives, and my system information indicates I have a total of 149.05GB. The partitions are correct, but only total up to 149.05. Is there an answer to this. I tried to find a similar situation before posting this but none of the problems seem to be like mine.
Thanks, Bob H

Discussion is locked

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Re: system not showing true HD size
Aug 10, 2004 10:27PM PDT

That's about the right number for the 137GB non-48-bit LBA enabled disk size.

You neglected the forum tip about OS and more, so I will leave you with this URL.

http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm

Bob

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Re: system not showing true HD size
Aug 11, 2004 9:54PM PDT

When is a GB not a GB? When marketing gets involved in quoting disk specs. 160,000,000,000 bytes = 149 kilo-kilo-kilo bytes. 1 kilobyte = 1024 = 2^10. Many disk manufacturers quote mumble bytes as base ten, the computer is sensitive to power of 2 boundaries, hence computer pros think in powers of 2. This is a common mis-understanding, especially since most of us really don't have all that much use for Base-2. In other words 160GB = 149GB depending on who does the counting. Now, is that perfectly clear?

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re: system not showing true HD size
Feb 9, 2005 7:31AM PST

If you look on the packaging of a HDD it will have fine print stating that 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. XP sees 1GB = 1, 064,000,000 bytes (or close to that). Marketing ploy to make you feel like you're getting more, but everyone does it so price comparisons are still effective.

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(NT) (NT) 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
Feb 10, 2005 4:11AM PST