Capacity of New Hard Drive

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kebang Commentator Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Bohol Island, Philippines Posts: 65	Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 5:33 AM
	Is there any way of measuring the true capacity of a hard drive at the point of purchase, or the moment you connect it to your PC? I purchased a 700GB hard drive some months ago, which when connected to the PC shows its size to be 698GB. I'm not complaining about the missing 2GB! However I now cannot save any more files to this hard drive even though my PC still claims there is 136 GB free. As the drive was purchased over 3 months ago it is now out of warranty. (I live in The Philippines & even when goods are still in warranty & found to be faulty it is very hard to persuade a vendor to honour the warranty). However with the next drive I buy, if I can test its size within a day or so of purchase I stand a much better chance of returning it to the vendor if faulty kebang __________________ Green to Brown & Blue to Bits
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mjb1962853 Guru Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: NY Posts: 1207 Good Answers: 119	#1 Re: Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 7:32 AM
	Using Windoze? Is part of the new drive used for swap-file, trash folder, or system restore points? Did the drive come with any junk software preloaded that you could/should erase? Please also read this thread... http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/72482
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kebang Commentator Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Bohol Island, Philippines Posts: 65	#2 Re: Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 9:56 AM
	Yes I'm using Windows XP. The HDD is only used for storing video files, no restore points, recycle bin etc. etc. Right Click on the drive, click properties & it shows 136GB free, yet I cannot save a 4.3gb .iso file (or other files) to this drive. If the info told me the drive was 565Gb with 1gb free thats fine, but that is not what is happening. You may have guessed I'm not too clever with computers, but common sense tells me I should be able to save a 4gb file to a drive with 136gb free __________________ Green to Brown & Blue to Bits
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SolarEagle Guru Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: by the beach in Florida Posts: 33392 Good Answers: 1817	#3 In reply to #2 Re: Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 11:24 AM
	You need to defrag your drive and compress your files.... __________________ All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
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mjb1962853 Guru Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: NY Posts: 1207 Good Answers: 119	#5 In reply to #2 Re: Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 1:26 PM
	My past experience with XP was with the NTFS file system. I didn't have any "practical" partition or file size limitations. The FAT32 file system (Win98 and XP) has a ~4GB file size limitation. See this MS support link... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463 Is the new drive formatted to FAT32 or NTFS?
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Barchetta Power-User Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Kentucky Lake Posts: 390 Good Answers: 26	#4 Re: Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 12:36 PM
	The numbers used to sell the drive refer to the maximum physical capacity of the drive. The amount of space available for actual data storage will vary according to the operating system's file system. Some of the drive needs to be used to store the data about where the files are stored on the drive. A journaling file system will use disk space to store information about the data changes. Some space is unusable due to file sizes not fitting perfectly into allocated spaces. No file system is able to make 100% of the disk available to the user. Furthermore, a nearly full drive will be very slow due to excessive file fragmentation.
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kebang Commentator Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Bohol Island, Philippines Posts: 65	#6 Re: Capacity of New Hard Drive 09/02/2012 7:15 PM
	Thank you all for your replies. The drive is FAT32, & mjb's reply answers the problem. All the files saved so far on this external FAT32 HDD are video files of less than 3gb. All my .ISO files, which are all around 4.3gb, are saved on another external drive which is NTFS. (This was a happy accident - I didn't plan it this way!) The NTFS drive is now full so I was attempting to save an .ISO to the FAT32 HDD. I've now proved to myself the HDD is ok by saving a 10gb music folder to it. Again many thanks to you all for taking the time to assist me. kebang __________________ Green to Brown & Blue to Bits
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