Problem with Maxtor 200GB Hard Drive

[NeoNight]

ok I had gotten a 200GB Maxtor Diamond 10 drive. I had used that big drive enabler program to get windows xp to reconize the drive. Only problem was that it picked up the drive as a 127GB drive instead of 200 or anything close to it. I had formated it in the process and then I had attemped to back up some files which were about 12GB total. I then decedied to use Max blast 4 to attempt to quickly reformat the drive again and move my windows xp installation over to it. Problem is the drive is only read as a 189 GB drive, though according to Max Blast its a 203.92GB drive. I have the drive set as Master am thinking should I have set it to cap limit? or something?

[oni_666]

189gb is correct for a formatted 200gb drive.
When you format you lose about 6% of its full capacity, due to the MBR (master boot record) and other such stuff.

[NeoNight]

ohhhh yeah alright thanks! (I actually forgot about that)

[duffers20]

yeh thats the way they advertise the drive as a certain capacity, but when it comes to actual space available to you, its less. My 20gb iPod only allows me to store 18.9gb of stuff.

[xLostx]

other people pretty much covered it

[furiousV]

i got 2 Maxtor Diamondmax 9 SATA 80GBs and one is 74.5GB the other 76.3GB

amazing isnt it

[oni_666]

i got 2 Maxtor Diamondmax 9 SATA 80GBs and one is 74.5GB the other 76.3GB

amazing isnt it


My 2 maxtor 80gb's both format to the same capacity as yours too...weird!

[Maxi]

It's not that...

I don't EXACTLY remember the way they do it but MS and the HD makers use different ammounts of bits to make a byte or something like that, so in the HD makers world 200 gigabyte IS 200 gigabyte, but windows does it in another way and says that it's less than 200.

[oni_666]

I know all about the 8 bits in a byte, 1024 bytes in a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte, 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte,etc.

Take for example the 200gb drive.

hard drive manufacturers define one gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas everyone else defines one gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1kB = 1,024 bytes, 1MB = 1,024 kB, and 1GB = 1,024 MB). This means that this drive's actual capacity is about 186GB.