External hard drive missing gigs?

[Rusalka]

I recently bought my first hard drive, a Hitachi 640GB, I just plugged it in and it's telling me there's 595 GB of 595 GB available.

Like I said, this is my first hard drive, can someone explain the reason why I'm missing 45 GB? Is it an operating system? Is there anyway to get rid of it?

 

[nanofrog]

I recently bought my first hard drive, a Hitachi 640GB, I just plugged it in and it's telling me there's 595 GB of 595 GB available.

Like I said, this is my first hard drive, can someone explain the reason why I'm missing 45 GB? Is it an operating system? Is there anyway to get rid of it?

Formatting.

The capacity listed by the manufacturer, doesn't take this into account.

 

[mobilehaathi]

It is all there. It has to do with them advertising 640GB where as the OS is measuring in GiB.

 

[flopticalcube]

or here: Hard Drive Size Discrepancy

 

[spinnerlys]

Hard drive manufactures use the wrong conversion "rate" for measuring their HDDs for marketing purposes.

In reality 1024 bytes are 1 kilobyte, but the HDD manufactures use 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte.

So you have approx. 640.000.000.000 bytes of HDD space on your new HDD, which is 640.000.000.000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 gigabyte.

640.000.000.000 bytes = 596 gigabytes.

 

[Rusalka]

Thank you all very much for being so informative and helpful