Shortchanged of HDD Capacity

[myxzyden]

Hi all,
I bought a refurbished MB with 80GB of HDD. However when I checked there was only 72GB available, the rest are bad sectors... That's 10% gone, do you guys think its acceptable?

Also, the MB has almost 20GB worth of data inside the HDD upon delivery. That's quite alot IMO, is that the norm?

Thanks all

 

[marvinsum]

It leaves the factory with about 18gb of data, so 20gb sounds close enough. You can remove the Office 2004 and iWork trials if you don't need it.

As for the bad sectors, I'm not sure. It seems odd that there would be 8gb of bad sectors. I think its just reserved for the partition tables. Mine is (nearly) new and only 69gb (out of 80gb) is available.

 

[Queso]

An 80GB drive will only have about 74.5GB of usable space even without formatting. It's all to do with the difference between how computers and humans count. However, if the drive already has bad sectors I would take it back. New drives shouldn't have those.

 

[marvinsum]

Oops, I forgot about my etra 5GB partition, so 69gb + 5gb = 74gb, as dynamicv said.

 

[mkrishnan]

Note, however, that you won't get above the 74.2 or whatever gigs regardless of no bad sectors. That's purely due to the difference between 1024^3 bytes per gigabyte (how OSes count) and 10^9 bytes per gigabyte (how hard drive mfr's count).

 

[Wolfpup]

Why do you think it has 8GB of bad sectors? As mentioned, you're probably just referring to the formated capacity.

If a hard drive ACTUALLY had 8GB of bad sectors you should trash it immediately, as it's virtually dead. A modern hard drive that shows as having ANY bad sectors is really, really far gone and should be retired immediately.

 

[Antares]

Yep, it's purely due to the different ways computers and humans calculate bytes. For example, I bought a 750GB Seagate drive and was dissaponted to find that my iMac only sees it as 698GB. I blame Microsoft.

 

[myxzyden]

Ha ha.... I got to blame something for my technical ignorance you see. Since I couldn't find a good reason why the HDD was missing 8GB, I "assumed" it is bad sector. So it's normal to get 74GB out of 80GB HDD, well I learnt something new today

 

[WildCowboy]

For the "official Apple explanation," see this support article.