How come my external hard drive of 640 GB says it only has about 600 GB when i connected it to my computer?
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I ordered an external hard drive and i thought it would be 640 GB but once i plugged it into my computer and everything, it says it only has 596 GB. Why did this happen?
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Answer:
Mercuri is correct, and deserves the best answer. I do want to expand a little bit on the answer, however... Hard drive manufacturers decided a while ago to count the number of bytes on a drive in base-10 (like how we do mathematics) instead of how the operating system counts memory and storage. There's 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte, 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte, 1024 gigabytes in a terabyte, and so on. So according to the counting method the computer uses, 1 gigabyte is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes - significantly more than what the marketing departments for hard drive manufacturers call a gigabyte. In the case of your 640 gig hard drive, you have around 640 billion bytes of storage, but the computer sees it at around 596 gigabytes because of the different counting system.
christina b at Yahoo! Answers Visit the source
Other answers
It's the way you calculate disk space. HD manufacturers used 1KB=1000bytes. However, computers are binary so 1KB = 1024 bytes. The error is compounded to 1024x1024 for megabytes and 1024x1024x1024 for gigabytes. Your 640GB drive is actually 640x10^9 bytes. If you do the math and convert it to binary, it comes out to about 596GBs. (640/(1.024x1.024x1.024)=596.046447753…
Mercuri
Your hard drive is now formatted and usable.
gikstar
Why did Gikstar get a thumbs down rating? He's exactly right. When your HD is formatted for a file system (NTFS mostly these days) your hard drive will lose a chunk of its max capacity. Happens to every hard drive ever made. It's normal :) I think Gikstar should get the Best Answer! Some moron came by and jacked him up for no reason.
Greg B
Your hard drive may have came with the manufacture files in a directory, Even when those are not there, you are looking at the raw hard drive capacity with no format in the ads. A little misleading, but not illegal.
Lee P
These Tips might help... >If it came with a CD install it. >Format the external drive >restart computer.
alzy101
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