Newbie Question - Hard Drive Space

[YWChg]

Hi,
I have a used harddrive which is taken out from my old system to use as a secondary storage on my new setup.
So as normally people will do, I've try to delete all the partition and reformat it. But there's strange thing I notice about the free space on that drive after the format. It shows 100% free but the capacity and free space doesnt match(first picture). And the second picture shows the drive is 99MB used. What is that 99MB all about? Can it be system reserved? This is not the system drive, how come? Anyone tell me about that?

 

[Ubrales]

See "Units of measuring capacity" in - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

This explains it well.

 

[YWChg]

"High level formatting then writes the file system structures into selected logical blocks to make the remaining logical blocks available to the host OS and its applications.[38] The operating system file system uses some of the disk space to organize files on the disk, recording their file names and the sequence of disk areas that represent the file. Examples of data structures stored on disk to retrieve files include the MS DOS file allocation table (FAT), and UNIX inodes, as well as other operating system data structures. As a consequence not all the space on a hard drive is available for user files. This file system overhead is usually less than 1% on drives larger than 100 MB."

So this could be the file system structure's files right? Now I know that. Many thanks.

 

[YWChg]

Best answer selected by YWChg.

 

[Ubrales]

Thank you! The article also explains the difference between bits and bytes. The marketing guys prefer to use the larger number to describe the drives.

 

[YWChg]

Yes, I'm aware of that measurement kind of stuff, but these 99MB hidden file on a blank hard drive just makes me crazy, I thought it was kind of virus, malware, leftover files or something.....
Thanks.

 

[Ubrales]

Yes, I'm aware of that measurement kind of stuff, but these 99MB hidden file on a blank hard drive just makes me crazy, I thought it was kind of virus, malware, leftover files or something.....
Thanks.

Well, now you know what it is -