GB vs. GiB
Can anyone else who has the WD 320 installed confirm what size the formatted drive is? Mine is reading as 297.77 Gb capacity, is this what it should be?
Hard drive manufacturers are deceptive when they label their drives.
In the computer world, by any measurement, from any operating system, the correct way to calculate a GB as 1024^3 bytes (1024 is 2 to the 10th power, raised to the third power = 2^30) or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Hard drive manufacturers, however, count a GB as 1000^3 (1000 to the third power) or 1,000,000,000. "Everybody does it" is their lame excuse. AFAIK, these may be the only humans in existence* who's mothers didn't ask them, "If your friends all walked off a cliff...?"
Anyway, if you do the math you'll see the difference is about 7% (1-(10^9/2^30)) which is almost exactly the difference you are seeing between your formatted size and what Western Digital printed on the size of the box.
Because the terms GB or gig
abyte have been so hopelessly contorted by hard drive manufacturers, a standards body has come up with a new set of unambigious terms;
Gibibyte abbreviated G
iB are now being used instead. While a GB could be mean 10^9 or 2^30, a G
iB always means exactly 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
*
The people who used to measure the old CRT monitors used to be in this group but I'm pretty sure they evolved into lobbyists, in which case the whole "human" thing no longer applies. 