If I change my jumpers can I get more Harddrive space?

[nuro]

I think I recalled that my harddrive was 40gb but it came with only 20gb in it. I just saw a friend of mine get a 80gb harddrive and switch the jumpers to get a 120gb harddrive.

I checked everest and the only info i found about my harddrive was its number: WDC WD200BB-75AUA1

can someone tell me if I can get more juice from my harddrive?

 

[A True Folder]

If that model number is correct it is only an 18GB hard drive, switching jumpers does not "magically" increase physical disk size so I have no idea what you think you saw your friend do.

 

[muz]

Sometimes hard drives have a jumper setting to limit their size to something , like my 60gb seagate baracuda has one to limit size to 36 or 32gb i think
But i dont think that hard drive will have that feature

 

[MooseMan1]

You will also find that Windows will not utilize the entire drive's capasity. I have a 250GB HD and it only uses 234GB or somewhere around that. The larger the HD the more space is not utilized.

 

[muz]

I think the correct ammount is 93% of the drives advertised size is what you can realy use , i have just checked it on my two drives and that seems the case

 

[MooseMan1]

I think the correct ammount is 93% of the drives advertised size is what you can realy use , i have just checked it on my two drives and that seems the case

sounds pretty accurate. I'm not sure why that is the case, maybe to prevent the hardrive getting currupt or something.

 

[muz]

sounds pretty accurate. I'm not sure why that is the case, maybe to prevent the hardrive getting currupt or something.

I dunno maybe its cos HD makers measure a GB as 1000MB and windows measures it as 1024MB

 

[hascet]

Its also because some sectors on the drive are bad so Windows cannot use those sectors therefore it doesn't count it as free space.

 

[MooseMan1]

I dunno maybe its cos HD makers measure a GB as 1000MB and windows measures it as 1024MB

that is actually a very good point. I don't know if that is correct because I knew they measured RAM that way but I did not know that about disk space.

hascet, on a new drive most of the time all the sectors will be good. Plus I doubt several gigs worth of sectors would be bad on every drive, that would be a horrible ratio.

 

[connchri]

OK, heres a overly simplified explination of whats happening.

Hard drives write data on the disc platters in "cells" called sectors. Each sector however, must be address for the computer to recall and write data to it. In older machines, there was a limit to how many sectors you could address, or "map out". A bit like how 32bit Operating systems have a limit on how much ram they can address (3-4GB), over 64bit OS that can address Terabytes. In the days of only 50MB HDD's, they never thought ahead of the limits in the way they address the sectors and when larger drives came out like 30 odd GB. They had to improvise new ways to address larger ammounts. New ways to map out the sectors emerged, each surpasing the previous method, each being able to map out more sectors than the previous standard. The first standard to break the 504MB barrier was CHS (Cylinder Head Sector), followed by Extended CHS, then Large, LBA (Logical Block Addressing) etc etc.

What the jumper that your mentioning does, is force the hard drive to use a previous mode of addressing that limits the drive capacity to 32GB, as that is the limit to the sectors that standard can address so it can be compatible with older motherboards that does not support newer addressing methods such as LBA. It does not increase your hardrive capacity in anyway, it can only limit it, perhaps your mate accidenty had it in this mode. leave yours as it is if you are getting the full storage capacity of the specs of the drive.

A Note for the comment about missing 7% of hardrive space, this is because manufacturers still sells storage devices measuring KB as 1000 bytes, MB as 1000KB and GB as 1000MB, ie, a manufacturers labels a 160000000000 byte hard drive as "160GB". This is wrong! a KB is 1024Bytes, 1MB = 1024KB, 1GB = 1024MB, so to get a real 160GB Hard drive it should have 171798691840 bytes. And a 160000000000 byte hard drive is really a 149GB hard drive. It has nothing to do with the file system the drive is formatted in, as belived by a lot of techies.

Hope that helps.