Just wondering if there is anyway of squeezing just a little more space out of my 120 gb drive. After formatting it only gives me about 111gb, which is mighty annoying when you deal mainly with large files (avi’s, mpg’s, etc). :thumbdown:

Have tried turning off system restore which seemed to free up some space (never did get it to actually restore anything). Am planning a reformat in the near future and was wondering if reformatting the drive in NTFS, would, by chance, give me any more space. Any other ideas, guys and gals?

The manufacturer calling it a 120 GB drive isn't quite accurate. It actually only has 120,000,000,000 Bytes, which is about 112 GB. My 60 GB drive has 61,400,000,000 Bytes which is 57 GB. So seeing 111 GB would be about right. NTFS might give you a bit more space, and it's more stable than FAT, but unless you were planning to re-format anyway, it's probably not worth the trouble. Hope this helps.

Yes; my Maxtor 120 reports 122,904.959,216 bytes, or 114GB. Hard disk manufacturers quote the basic bytes and are silent about the conversion which gives you less - but memory makers usually do the reverse ( a nominal 64KB being 65,536 bytes and so on).

Whichever, 120GB is still a biggy! :)

Just take a look there http://www.betaone.net/index.php?showtopic=21393

Maybe that will answer ur question !!! i hope so !

It all depends on how we define a GigaByte... No one really knows lol, but here is the scoop :P

historial context...
"Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body. "

according to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 B or 10^9. Microsoft labels the drive as GigaByte, but in fact uses gibibyte - 1 073 741 824 GiB thus loosing about 7%.

So with that said, this is how windows sees your 120GB drive:
(120 * 10^9) / 1073741824 = 111.758708953857421875 or ~111 GigaBytes

;) :D

Prefixes for binary multiples
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Factor Name Symbol Origin Derivation
2^10 kibi Ki kilobinary: (2^10)^1 kilo: (10^3)^1
2^20 mebi Mi megabinary: (2^10)^2 mega: (10^3)^2
2^30 gibi Gi gigabinary: (2^10)^3 giga: (10^3)^3
2^40 tebi Ti terabinary: (2^10)^4 tera: (10^3)^4
2^50 pebi Pi petabinary: (2^10)^5 peta: (10^3)^5
2^60 exbi Ei exabinary: (2^10)^6 exa: (10^3)^6


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Examples and comparisons with SI prefixes
one kibibit 1 Kibit = 2^10 bit = 1024 bit
one kilobit 1 kbit = 1^03 bit = 1000 bit
one mebibyte 1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
one megabyte 1 MB = 10^6 B = 1 000 000 B
one gibibyte 1 GiB = 2^30 B = 1 073 741 824 B
one gigabyte 1 GB = 10^9 B = 1 000 000 000 B

*edit*
had some numbers messed up

offtopic:

[SiN]? That used to be something else?

hehe yea, [SiN] used to be Lucky - got tired of the old name :P

Ah, that's you Lucky...! Ok, I'll be used to it.

(Now I also see your signature... Ooops.

unicorn /me goes wash my eyes

hehe, I just added that to my sig after you asked... thought it may help for others to know lol

I always thought that for JUST storage you would go for FATxx. Is the Master File System (¿NTFS?) better for storage files, big or small?

Well NTFS can store a file as large as the disk space availale (well currently at least... the maximum size of a file is like 2^64 bytes, and I dont see one of them drives commin a long for a while), while FAT32 is limited to 4GB (cant say I ever saved a file as large as a 120GB drive lol)

Generally, NTFS on larger size drives/partitions is faster. While, FAT is faster on smaller drives. Faster, being the aaccess time to the file on the drive.

Another thing, more important, is the cluster size between NTFS and FAT. As you increase the volume or partition size in a FAT32 system, the cluster size also increases. The cluster size ranges from 4K to 32K. You reach the 32K maximum with drives larger than 32 gigabytes, at least according to Microsoft. FAT can have large minimum cluster sizes that reduce the usable storage space on the volume. The largest NTFS cluster size is 4KB, even on volumes larger than 2GB. Because NTFS uses small clusters better and has a more efficient design, its performance doesn't degrade with large volumes, in contrast to FAT's. Remember, if a file is lets say 3 k, on an NTFS volume you are only wasting 1k of space, on the other hand on a FAT volume with the clusters at 32 k you waste a lot 29k for that one file is lost (on a drive 32GB and >).

Thanks to all who replied. This has been quite an eye opener - imagine a 120gig drive not being as advertised by the manufacturers. So now after installing my second 120 drive (formatted in NTFS, of course) , there will only be 222 gigs of storage - oh well will have to make do. :)

@[SiN]
Thank you for your in-depth reports on data storage and NTFS, they were truly informative.

Sin - very nice piece of information there... really help me to recap my polytechnic days.

really need to consider a switch over to NTFS now... for better managed file system.

Thank you.. I too wish to switch over to NTFS on ALL my drives when I get back to school..

Though FATxx makes it easier to go in and fix something with a DOS boot disk.

how does NTFS cluster size affect raid arrays? i'm going to buy 2 120gb drives in a few weeks and put them in a raid0 array, my first array so this should be interesting, lol

My 40GB shows only 37.2GB and accordingly yours should show 37.2GB*3=111.6GB
I'm not that concerned about loosing space on my 40GB, and you're talking about over 100GB!!! lol