Seagate 400 GB external HDD shows only 372 GB?

[yexusbeliever1]

I have a situation.

I bought a Seagate 400GB external HDD. But once I plug and play, I only see the max is 372 GB. Almost 30 GB lost. Can someone enlight me on this? Why is it like this? And how will I get it to be max at 400 GB?

 

[Raffaz]

you will never get the max coz some is lost from the formatting

 

[hascet]

ya the max on a hard drive will never be wats advertised, just because some of the disk is bad when its manufactured and the format takes the bad spots out

 

[Anubis1980]

my 160gb formats as 152 so i think u shud have more space than he is getting? even from bad blocks, these r very small in number and shouldnt equate to more than a few bytes. id have guessed u should be getting around 380gb, which isnt much more i guess, but more non the less. Could be wrong often have been lol.

 

[DJ-CHRIS1]

That amount of space seems right

All the 320 gig Seagate drives I have format to 298 gig under NTFS

My 120 gig FAT32 Maxtor drive formats to 114.

NTFS has alot of file overhead due to the fact it's an advanced filesystem. It records alot more infomation and has alot more options than FAT32.

 

[Nik00117]

HD manfactors count a GIG as 1000
XP as 1024

Theres part of the difference.

 

[Raffaz]

Sorted lol

 

[superman22x]

I onve read in a magazine, to subtract 7% off the actual, because harddrive manufactors cant count past 1000 as Nik00117 said, lol.

 

[THEpiGUY]

I onve read in a magazine, to subtract 7% off the actual, because harddrive manufactors cant count past 1000 as Nik00117 said, lol.

Exactly. 93% is a very good estimate of what you're getting on XP. According to MS Calculator, you get precisely 93.1322574615478515625 percent. So it should read about "372.53GB" according to that. Here's the math behind it.

1000x1000x1000=1000000000 <-According to (most) HDD manufacturers
(↕1KB)(↕1MB)(↕1GB)
1024*1024*1024=1073741824 <-What Windows XP reads

1000000000/1073741824=0.931322574615478515625
0.931322574615478515625*400=372.52902984619140625

 

[yexusbeliever1]

I feel almost as I have been tricked.

I guess since it looks good to keep, I will keep it. But that is bad marketing for them to say on the cover to be 400GB and only get 372GB.