Hardrive capacity after formatting?

[Bmode]

Why does a 120GB HD only have a 111GB capacity after formatting. My format for this Western Digital internal drive ATA-100 is Mac OS extended, so what's the other 9GB's doing? Also, does indexing really help and how often should I do it?

[Nik_Doof]

Simple dynamics of HDDs, you've gotta think overheads and advertising blunders :)

Advertised as 120gig, when 1 gig = 1000, actually 1 gig = 1024, so theres a loss there. Also filesystems have overheads for allocation tables, cluster information, and journals (HFS+).

I think thats how it goes, correct me if im wrong.

[edesignuk]

Yup, that's how it goes. I have a 120GB SATA drive, I get 114GB usable, and I just got a 200GB SATA, of which only 189GB is usable :( oh well...

[sonofslim]

yep, i've got two 120gb drives myself and they both hold 111 gigs.

[Bmode]

Thanks for the info, I thought it was something like that. Cheers.