What happen when the hard disk capacity that Windows displays is lower than the

[Dstiles]

What happen when the hard disk capacity that Windows display is lower than the capacity of the hard disk

 

[guavasauce]

depends on how much lower. windows always take a little bit, and and some is left behind due to allocating.

if you have a 250gb hard drive, but is only showing up as 235 or so, thats normal. by standard, the hard drive does have 250gb of space, but due to formating and actual space usage, the drive become 235 usable gb.

 

[lafontma]

Welcome to the world of us being screwed by hard disk vendors ... Hard disk vendors sell you a 1TB drive but it is actually is actually 931 GB... Computers use powers of 2 or put another way multiples of 1024 when hard disk vendors use 1000. Always been like this but with hard disks getting bigger, the difference is quite important these days

 

[lafontma]

depends on how much lower. windows always take a little bit, and and some is left behind due to allocating.

if you have a 250gb hard drive, but is only showing up as 235 or so, thats normal. by standard, the hard drive does have 250gb of space, but due to formating and actual space usage, the drive become 235 usable gb.

Completly wrong..... so my answer

 

[willard]

by standard, the hard drive does have 250gb of space, but due to formating and actual space usage, the drive become 235 usable gb.

Not true.

The difference in space comes between the difference between a gigabyte as interpreted by the marketing departments, and a gigabyte as interpreted by your computer. By convention, and to make their products look more attractive, drives are sold with capacities listed using decimal SI prefixes where a gigabyte (GB) is a billion bytes.

However, your computer is a binary system, and defines data sizes differently. A kilobyte, to your computer, is 2^10 bytes, or 1024 bytes. Similarly, a megabyte is a kilo-kilobyte, or 2^20, and a gigabyte is 2^30, terabyte 2^40, and so on and so forth.

This results in a compounding error that gets larger as you move through the list of prefixes. By the time you hit terabytes, you're down to about 90% of the space you were expecting.