Working out actual usable hard drive space

[nathan]

I'm buying (in the near future) 4 500gb hard drives, does anyone know of a little program to work out the usable space. if i remember right you have to convert your space into bytes, then devide it by something, It would make the grey hairs slow down if there was a nice easy program to work it out.

ta mucho

 

[MikeEnIke]

You want a program like Partition Magic to partition it or am I misunderstanding?

 

[nathan]

You want a program like Partition Magic to partition it or am I misunderstanding?

misunderstanding matey, i dont want to partition format or anything.

when you buy say a 80GB hard drive, put it in, format it, it wont say there is 80GB space free, it will say something like 74.5GB free.

This is because hard drive manufactorers measure space in base 2 (i think) and we count in base 10. Therefor there is always a difference. i think you always loose 7% of the advertised space. not 100% sure though and my maths suck at 11pm (well, they always suck)

I'm trying to work out how much space i would loose with 4 500gb hard drives. in other words 2048Gb of space. I have a feeling i would loose around the 200GB mark.

 

[JN]

I'll have a look for you in the morning, but i've always thought it was the case that hard disk manufacturers count 1mb as 1024kb whereas windows counts 1mb as 1000kb (megabytes vs mibibytes).

On top of that you'll also loose a % of the drive depending on what filesystem it's partitioned with and a small amount more on windows because it likes to leave 8mb unpartitioned at the end of the disk for some reason!

 

[nathan]

I'll have a look for you in the morning, but i've always thought it was the case that hard disk manufacturers count 1mb as 1024kb whereas windows counts 1mb as 1000kb (megabytes vs mibibytes).

On top of that you'll also loose a % of the drive depending on what filesystem it's partitioned with and a small amount more on windows because it likes to leave 8mb unpartitioned at the end of the disk for some reason!

it will be 1 partition (raid 0) in ntfs. cheers for your help matey

 

[FragTek]

http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm

Hope that link helps a bit

 

[macgamesrule]

4 * 500 * (1000)^3 / (1024) ^3 = 1862.6GB. Of course this isn't taking into account the other bits XMS mentioned, but it's a decent estimate.

Quick rule of thumb I use is multiply # of GB by 0.93 (or in other words, subtract 7%), since that's the ratio of (1000/1024)^3. Gives 1860GB in this case.

 

[nathan]

wooo, my guestimate wasnt that far off, thanks matey, at least i know how to work it out in the future!

 

[Hyper]

4 * 500 * (1000)^3 / (1024) ^3 = 1862.6GB. Of course this isn't taking into account the other bits XMS mentioned, but it's a decent estimate.

Quick rule of thumb I use is multiply # of GB by 0.93 (or in other words, subtract 7%), since that's the ratio of (1000/1024)^3. Gives 1860GB in this case.

Reps left for that man, you learn something new everyday