WTF My brand new Maxtor 80 gig 7200rpm is showing only 75gig

[pr-man 1]

Any ideas?

[Alien 1]

's an HDD manufacturer [dishonest (IMO) ] marketting thing.

 

Software [eg windows] & most ppl look @ a HDD's size based on calculations using a base figure of 1024 to work from, whereas the manufacturers use 1000 as a base for their calculations - giving a higher size figure [basically they just take the 1st 2 digits of the total size in bytes]

 

80,000,000,000 / 1024 = 78,125,00 [KB]

78,125,000 / 1024 = 76,293.945 [MB]

76,293.945 / 1024 = 74.505806 [GB]

 

80 [real] GB = 85,899,345,920 bytes

[sapiens74 0]

yep kinda messed up but they all do it

[pr-man 1]

SOB

[Alien 1]

Quote:

yep kinda messed up but they all do it

Not all - I forget who actually gives honest figures, but I'm sure I remember reading that @ least 1 mfr does.

[sapiens74 0]

do scsi drives give actual specs?

[Alien 1]

Dunno, you'll have to ask someone with way more money than me

[Sampson 0]

Your 80 Gig hard drive probably has more than 80 Gig. Generally, there are scads of sectors that don't appear that are used for storing defects. You can't see these from your operating system. In the time of the dinasaurs when you low level formatted a disk, you could. In fact, XP and all MS products can only calculate the size of the disk from the type of file system they use to map the drive. If you are using NTFS, you automatically will lose a sizeable amount of space which is reserved by the system for what it calls MFT. Under the old 95/98 Windows once the logical drive exceeded 500Meg, a single file might report that it was 17,000 bytes big, but in actuality, since it might store the file in 16,384 bytes per sector, it was really holding down 32,768 bytes of space. 95os2 and 98SE corrected this somewhat, but you will always notice a difference if you copy a file to a floppy, you will see that the number of bytes it takes to store a file is lower than that reported on the hard disk. MS never thought anybody would ever need more than a 10meg hard drive. What the real crime here is the bloat of the products that we put on these disks that require such huge amounts of space.

[Dirty Harry 0]

If its of any comfort to you, my 80 GB IBM 120 GXP drive only shows up with 78529 MB. Alien gave the explanation.

 

Sampson

I don't quite follow your point when you wrote: "Your 80 Gig hard drive probably has more than 80 Gig. Generally, there are scads of sectors that don't appear that are used for storing defects."

 

Are you saying that there are spare sectors ? Otherwise who cares about space that you can't see or access ?

 

What goes to copying files to floppies and seeing a different size - I thought it was because of different cluster sizes.

 

H.

[pr-man 1]

well I formatted it as NTFS because I do video capturing. Should I have formated it as Fat32 instead?

[Dirty Harry 0]

Yes,

IMO, NTFS is just a unnecessary source of trouble for the average home / small LAN user. If we are talking big networks (say corporate or campus) the situation is different.

 

Be assured there will be dozens of prople that will reply to this and say that NTFS is so great because it is so secure etc, blah blah blah. But ask yourself the question: are these features really useful for me ? Or would you rather have the ability to boot from a floppy and tinker with your harddrive in case of problems?

 

H.

[clutch 1]

For my pal Dirty Harry, ask and ye shall receive...

 

I prefer NTFS no matter where I am setting up, as I have seen NT systems go into boot-time checkdisk WAY more with FAT than with NTFS as their file system formats. However, here is a nice page at Technet that covers the performance traits of both so you can get more info:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treevie...rt3/proch17.asp

[Sampson 0]

Sorry, Dirty Harry, I should have been clearer. I was making too many points. Some of it esoteric gibberish.

 

There are spare sectors in most hard drives for defects. So, most hard drives are actually larger than advertised. But, as you put it, who cares for what you don't see when what you want is usable for your own storage. But, the question of "what you don't see" was my next point (lamentably not written very clearly also).

 

The second point was that the operating system allocates bytes per cluster for storage. Normally, a floppy allocates 2048 bytes per cluster while at one point under Win95 as much as 16kb were allocated per cluster. What this meant was that if you created a document of 1kb and put it on your hard disk, it was really holding down 16kb of space, whereas on the floppy it was holding down 2kb. Lots of small documents on a hard disk were actually claiming more hard disk usage than was apparent. Alien's math is correct in speaking of size, what I was attempting to say was that depending on how the OS regulates bytes/cluster, the amount of bytes Explorer reports about the size of files has to balanced against the bytes/cluster distribution. Sorry about the floppy issue. I was just trying to say that Explorer may report 10 1K files as 10K of usage whereas it may actually be 160kb used on the hard drive. In surfing the net with little 2k files building up in the cache means that a lot more hard disk space is used than is seen.

[CyberGenX 0]

PR-Man STICK with NTFS!!! If you do video capturing like i do, FAT32 is your enemy!!! It only supports file sizes of 4.0 GIGs max! I learned this the hard way. Don't listen to anyone else on this. I produce video files for VHS conversion, my files are usually 5-7 gigs, FAT32 will corrupt after 4gigs.

[Dirty Harry 0]

Admitted, using extremely large files is the one (only ...) reason to go NTFS even on a home PC, for those of us who do video editing or have databases that size on their HD. I don't, but if I needed this I'd still keep at least the system partition as a FAT one.

And OK, at the point when you have 500 GB storage it would be annoying to have to do 16 partitions of 32 GB each

 

I am not trying to say that FAT is better, its just that the features of NTFS are largely irrelevant in a small enviroment. For my part I'd hate to loose the access to a hardrive after a boot off a floppy, its like a lifeboat to have DOS available when things go wrong. Just in case.

 

H.

[BladeRunner 0]

I always have done and always will use NTFS over FAT

The argument about being able to boot with a floppy is a little moot as ever since I discovered Win2k all those years ago I have never had to boot with a floppy to rescue an OS, the OS's are just too damn stable to need that ability.

 

Secondly, security.

Any letter I write as far as I'm concerned is for my eyes and the person who I am writing to.

Same goes for any Spreadsheets, etc.

So, a right-click on a folder, encrypt it.

I now know that even if somebody reinstalled the OS back over the top or took my HD's out and put them into another WinXP PC they are not going to be able to access my files, all nicely secured under 128bit encryption.

 

I'll always take NTFS, it's no slower than FAT, it's more secure and less prone to damage/instability.

 

Well that's my opinions on it anyway.

[Acarien 0]

Hi to everyone!

I can't wait to be a Senior Memeber... (...)

 

I got 3 little tricks for those who are wondering how to access files on a NTFS partition:

 

1- You can access the Recovery Console from Win2k/XP boot menu or you can choooose Repair when you boot up the Windows CDROM.

 

2- If you're still not able to live without the good old DOS, you can download NTFSDOS from http://www.winternals.com.

 

3- Like BladeRunner said, you rarely have to boot from a floppy disk with NTFS..

 

FAT32 sits one the same technology used on first 80's 10MB hard disks. With operating systems like Windows 2000 and Windows XP now accessible to almost everyone, it would be stupid to choose FAT32 instead of NTFS. Here are some of the benefits:

 

- First it got all the basic capabilities of FAT

- Built-in data reliability features to prevent file and file system corruption if the system fails

- Built-in file security with several access rights that can be assigned to files and directories

- Built-in disk compression, no need for third-party applications to do the job and sacrifice performance

- Native support for Long File Name

- Fault tolerant

- "NTFS is so great because it is so secure etc, blah blah blah." even Dirty Harry says that

 

As drive sizes and the number of files on a partition increase, FAT and FAT32 operations tend to be very slow.

If a system crashes while you are creating or up[censored] files or directories, FAT's on-disk structures can become inconsistent, and this can result in the loss of data being modified or general corruption of the drive.

 

Anyways, we could talk about it for weeks, but i got to take a shower (hehe i'm a little dirty) and go to bed. Goodnight!

 

ps: sorry for my english, i'm french...

[Dirty Harry 0]

Quote:

The argument about being able to boot with a floppy is a little moot ...the OS's are just too damn stable to need that ability.

Just look around here at NTcomp, quite often threads with locked files and similar probs pop up - all easily solved with a little floppy.

Quote:

Secondly, security.

Sure, NTFS is securer choice as a OS. But it so happens that I keep all the really secret files at work. BTW, a retina scanning device is not on my shopping list either.

Again, my argument is only that FAT can save you some headaches and NTFS doesn't offer me something I need on a home LAN.

H.

[Julian Mehnle 0]

Quote:

Just look around here at NTcomp, quite often threads with locked files and similar probs pop up - all easily solved with a little floppy.

You can easily install the Recovery Console (`x:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons` from within Windows) and then replace your files from there. It boots much faster than from a floppy, and takes only 7MB on your boot partition... What a deal!

Quote:

Sure, NTFS is securer choice as a OS. But it so happens that I keep all the really secret files at work. BTW, a retina scanning device is not on my shopping list either.

See it like this: with NTFS file encryption you have the freedom to store your secret files at home as well!

Quote:

Again, my argument is only that FAT can save you some headaches and NTFS doesn't offer me something I need on a home LAN.

If you say that for yourself, I can hardly disagree. For me personally, just the greatly improved robustness alone (which protects against file system corruption due to system crashes) justifies any efforts NTFS might cause me. Oh, by the way, did you know that NTFS notices when it takes too many tries to read a sector, and moves the data into a free, still intact sector automatically?

[Four and Twenty 0]

dirty hairy you must be smoking crack to wanna use fat

or you just have really small hard drives

i have 244 gigs in my system my largest partition is 149 gigs you can't do that with fat. fat is also extremely ineficient with large hard drives and as was already mentioned video editing. You don't need dos / fat to recover a system. Use the recovery console it is like dos but it is designed for nt/2k/xp. I also have a pakage from wininternals that can do recovery of broken systems.

 

leave fat in the past along with isa and parallel ports and the like.

NTFS = NT File System

if you use NT why not use the filesystem specifically designed for it.

[Brian Frank 0]

Once I finally moved all partition to NTFS, I have not once had chkdsk come up because of some error due to improper shutdown, etc. Only when I have done routine maitanence has it ever come up. Y'know what: I can't tell any difference in speed between NTFS and FAT32. I'm not dual-booting, so I have absolutely no need to use FAT32.

[Dirty Harry 0]

Hmm, maybe I would slowly become a believer with hard facts, and who knows, maybe I'll try an all- NTFS system one day (BTW I do currently have a partition at NTFS).

 

And true, I do have **extremely** small harddrives, one is a mere 80 Gig, the other a pity at 45 GB on my main sys. Maybe I should put in a few more drives from my other machines, so I could match the 244 GB and see the light. Beeing that I avoided ME because I didn't subscribe to the "Newer is Better" - "Bill is God" theory I don't quite see the point of the argument that NTFS is specifically designed for NT, which by the way is a bit old by know. Specifically designed are also the defrag utility of NT/XP and the CD-burning util of XP, are they also so great that you are on crack if you replace them with something else?

 

Still, this thread remains kinda short of real arguments, suspicions on my crack smoking and such doesn't explain quite what practical magic I'll get from leaving FAT. Oh, yes, I could put in the recovery console, great, one more thing to install to do exactly what theat floppy or dual boot does.

 

Good ol' Brian puts forward a good argument though, not have to see the chkdsk b-s is something I'd enjoy.

 

Who knows, more real arguments could turn me around, but crack smoking - no.

 

H.

[Alien 1]

Talking of chkdsk, is there any way to get rid of the 10 second delay/countdown when chkdsk comes up during a boot up, either because XP crashed or because you told it to run. With 98 you had the prompt/never/always setting that you could set with some tweak progs, but I have yet to see the equivalent for XP.

[clutch 1]

The checkdisk part and link I provided don't count DH? Hmmm, if I can think of other things I'll let you know. The link did state quite a bit about the differences, and having smaller clusters and the ability to store small files directly in the MFT for speedy access is pretty nice. But then again haven't had any issues where I couldn't get into my NTFS system partition without a utility (and that was only a few times for the networks that I manage).

[Dirty Harry 0]

Sure,

-chkdsk

-over 32 GB partitions

-over 4 GB files

-(nobody mentioned, but lots of files)

 

these are valid arguments.

 

But, of these three only getting rid of the chkdsk 8 sec annoyance is really what I would ever encounter at home. So I still feel very safe having the option to boot into dos, using dos tools n a dark day, and keep NTFS for those over 32 GB partitions which is a (not all that good) reason. Only have one of 'em, anyhow.

 

And security - Well, thats Mr. Smith, Mr. Wesson and me.

 

H.