Passport Drive

[figure]

Hello my lovely Gurus and Geeks!

I just bought a Passport Drive 320 GB. However when I checked it on the computer it's saying the capacity is 298 GB. Do you think there's something wrong with it as it's showing 298GB instead of 320GB, or is that normal? It's made by Western Digital. I'm using a laptop with Windows XP. Thanks! x

[wildwood]

This is quite normal. The missing space is used by the formatting so it can be used to actually store stuff.

[ChuckFickens]

hi figure,

Yeah quite normal.. as wildwood says the formatting of the drive takes a bit of space but also there are two way of measuring a gigabyte, it can either be taken as 1GB equals 1000mb or can be taken as 1gb equals 1024mb(the correct way).

Needless to say when your sold a hard drive they sell it to you using 1gb = 1000mb as this makes the drive look bigger, once the computer looks at it and works out the size the correct way (1gb= 1024mb) then the drive appears smaller.

Its late and I can't be bothered to do the math but seems to work out about right in my head for a advertised 320gb drive to come out as about 298gb.

[figure]

Thank you both for your answers.

Well as long as it's a normal thing and I'm not being duped 22GB! 22 whole GB for formatting???!! That's quite a lot.

I might be a bit thick here but bear with me. I think that's misleading an ignorant customer like me, I expect to see what I paid for, not in reality 298. Anyway when coming to computers and technology I trust whatever you all say. And you can tell all I understand from the answers is it's a normal thing; not a word of the calculations. ;-)

I also recently bought a couple 2GB flash drives. Like the passport drive, it showed less than 2GB; it showed 1972mb. I reformatted it, and it then said 2GB. Do you think it's wise to reformat the passport drive. It is expensive so I don't want to mess with it unnecessarily.

Hya Chucky! x

[ChuckFickens]

there may be another partition on the drive thats using a bit of the space, you could do with using the disk manager in windows to inspect the drive closer and seeing whats going on.

The 1000mb compared to 1024mb accounts for about 6gb of the difference but that don't explain it all.

BTW just put in a friend request for you on facebook

[figure]

Hahaha! The first laptop I had was 6GB; that was considered a lot of space then. Will add you now.

[Ethel]

My first 'proper' pc had a hard drive of less than 500 mb. It may have been less than 50mb. Wish I could remember for sure

It did everything I needed it to.

[Fay Mousse]

My first proper pc had a hard drive of less than 50mb - it did every thing I wanted.

My mp3 player is 60gb. Funny old world.

[figure]

60 gb!!! That will hold a lifetime of music!

[Ice.Maiden]

'scuse me figure - just before I go to bed - you seem to know a fair bit about computers, etc. I'm working on an old hp XP thing (about 5 year's old now). It was running on 2 drives until I had them cleaned, but now it's back to one again - if that makes any sense!! What happens when I run out of memory???? Oh dear - sorry!!!!