Posted: 7/3/2009 2:27:14 PM EDT
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So I was cleaning up my hard drive on my HP laptop which runs Vista. I pulled up the hard drive properties and I have a 220 gig hard drive and it shows that 71.5 gigs are used and 148 gigs are free which seemed like a lot of space being used so I pulled up the C: under Windows Explorer, unhid hidden and super hidden files and it only comes up at 47.5 gigs which means the computer thinks an additional 24 gigs is used up by something. There's a recovery partition of ~ 10 gigs under the D: drive, would this factor in? Just wondering where the 24 gigs might be. Any ideas? |
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A certain amount of space is taken up by the OS and partitioning.
ETA: You never have as much "usable" space as the hard drive is rated for. Unless you have some sort of weird virus that is storing stuff on your comp (unlikely), it's probably nothing out of the ordinary. |
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Hard drives when sold define a "gigabyte" as "one billion bytes" (industry standard practice), whereas on the software side of things a gigabyte is treated as 2^30 bytes, making the actual capacity lower than the advertised capacity. Add on top of this space used up by the partitioning/file storage scheme, and you end up with quite a bit of space less.
Technically, the hard drive makers are right, and 2^30 bytes should be referred to as a gibibyte instead of a gigabyte, but this is just the way things are. |
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Quoted:
Hard drives when sold define a "gigabyte" as "one billion bytes" (industry standard practice), whereas on the software side of things a gigabyte is treated as 2^30 bytes, making the actual capacity lower than the advertised capacity. Add on top of this space used up by the partitioning/file storage scheme, and you end up with quite a bit of space less. Technically, the hard drive makers are right, and 2^30 bytes should be referred to as a gibibyte instead of a gigabyte, but this is just the way things are. I remember when I first found out about this difference. |
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There is also the practice of mixing up bytes and bits. They are not counted the same, and it's possible to fiddle the numbers to look like they're bigger than they are. It's all about units of measure vs base number systems. Try out this conversion calculator:
http://www.speedguide.net/conversion.php |