Can I get more space from a brand new hard drive?

[CRT dude]

My new external 4TB hardrive has only 3.6 TB of free space after I deleted all the junk.

That 400 GB of space that the harddrive is sealing off.

Is there any way to reformat it & select it to get more space from it?

 

[USAFRet]

1TB drive = 961GB actual
2TB drive = 1.81TB actual
4TB drive = 3.6TB actual

1024 vs 1000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

 

[DarkSable]

The hard drive isn't 'sealing off' anything, that's typical. The problem is one of nomenclature.

To a hard drive manufacturer, 1GB is 1000MB... to windows / software, however, 1GB is 1024MB.

 

[bgunner]

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/172191en?language=en_US

Here is the explanation for why you are down 400 GB. This is common and normal. Please read the article provided for complete explanation.

 

[VincentP]

No, that's what you get.
The hard drive manufacturers specify 1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Windows (and everyone else) specify 1 TB = 1024*1024*1024*1024 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
This means that an advertised 1 TB hard drive is actually 0.909 TB and then you lose a little more to the file system.