Missing HDD Space!

AmateurPCGuy · April 5, 2014

Remember my Samsung N150 Plus with that broken keyboard? Yeah, I have a tiny problem with it. The laptop has a 250 GB HDD from Hitachi that's divided into 2 partitions: 60GB for C drive, and 172GB for my downloaded movies. All in all, it only takes up 232GB, which is 18GB off its original size. 18 GBs is BIG for me, y'know.

Now, my inquiry is: where did that 18 GB went? As fas as I know, C drive contains EVERYTHING that Windows needs, including critical files and such...

helping · April 5, 2014

232 usable is correct.

you're receiving what you have

jasgud · April 5, 2014

UEFI and windows will take a chunk. Cant remember how much, but it depends. System drive is usually around 100mb.

quote from http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f16/missing-space-on-new-750-gb-hard-drive-552793.html

The full capacity is there. A gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. Since Computers calculate on base 2, the closest number it can use int he interest of speed calculations is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Your drive has 750,000,000,000 bytes available ( 750 GB ) but the computer calculates that as 698 bytes ( 750000000000 / 1073741824 ) The 679 is a little low ( about 20 GB ) What does it show for total capacity in disk management

jscho · April 5, 2014

If I recall correctly, it's because the hard drive manufacturers use a different type of calculation to determine how much space there is. Windows uses Hexdecimal, so it calculates 1 megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, the hard drive factories calculate using binary, so 1 megabyte is 1000 kilobytes and so on. With such a large drive volume like 500GB, those 24 kilobytes add up. The space is still there, but Windows just calculates drive space differently.