Lost space on my hard drive

[Abhijit 0]

When I configured my 10.2Gig Western Digital Hard disk to NTFS, as a secondary hard drive ( to store data only) why did the total disk space become 9878 MB??

Please help.

Thanks in advance.

Abhijit

[CUViper 0]

That has to do with the fact that hard drive manufacturers calculate 1 gig = 10^9 bytes, whereas windows calculates it in powers of 2

 

1 kB = 2^10 = 1024 bytes

1 mB = 2^20 = 1048576 bytes

1 gB = 2^30 = 1073741824 bytes

 

So your 10.2 gig hard drive really has 10,200,000,000 bytes, whereas windows would only call it 10.2 gig if it had ~10,952,166,605 bytes

[Bursar 0]

Also, NTFS has a massive overhead compared to FAT.

 

When you format a disk using FAT, a few KB are reserved for File Allocation Tables and stuff like that.

 

With NTFS, you need around 5MB to store that information. That's the main reason you can't format floppy disks using NTFS. The basic file structure is just too big to fit.