640GB Western Digital HD not showing full capacity in Windows

[FrPSh]

Hey community -

I recently received a 640 GB WD hard drive (Caviar Black) and installed it in my computer. Everything seems to work great (a nice upgrade from my 160 GB seagate), except the fact that it only shows up in Windows as 598 GB. I would expect there to be a little bit of lost space just the way the drive was formatted, but 42 GB? Has anyone else seen this type of problem? Is there a way I can get Windows to recognize this extra space?

Thanks for any suggestions.
FrPSh

 

[montyuk]

sounds perfectly normal to me, my 1tb goes down to 931gb when formatted...

 

[mindless728]

^-1 its not because it is formatted

its because windows using the wrong nomenclature, they should be using GiB (1024^3) and not what drive makers use (1000^3)

so here is a little math
(640 * 1000 ^ 3) / 1024^3 = 596 GiB
which then windows using the wrong suffix GB and you get 596GB

 

[FrPSh]

Ah very cool - that makes sense now. Thanks so much mindless!