Three 160GB drives, all with different capacities?

[zephead]

I've known for a while that because HD manufacturers and computers themselves define bytes differently, but is this (see image) because they choose how much GBs we're gonna see when we plug them into our computers?

edit: *smacks forehead* I forgot to push "Upload File".

 

[xUKHCx]

Looks ... and sees ... no picture.

 

[Royale w/cheese]

The MIB got to em first.

 

[TEG]

Your internal drive has extra partitions for driver data, Journaling Data, some system specific information, etc. The Firewire drive does not have all those extra partitions. The USB had some more, mainly because it is USB, there are special drivers loaded into a partition to get it to work properly.

I've had the same problem. I have a drive that is 160GB both Firewire and USB, and it registers about 147.2GB.

TEG

 

[zephead]

Would they happen to be hidden partitions that aren't accessible no matter what anyone does?

edit: Or is the whole driver info/special drivers/extra partition thing just a crappy cover-up because of the thing about how manufacturers define a byte differently than computers? And if 160 billion bytes actually comes out to 149.01GB, then how do the Maxtor and LaCie drives have an extra 3-4 GB?