1 Topic by nimble

  • nimble
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-30
  • Posts: 3

Topic: 250 gig hard drive shows up as 232 gig?

Hello,

I have an empty 250g external drive that I've just reformatted from fat32 to ext3.  I've noticed, though, that there is a pretty large reduction in drive size: it's listed as 232.88g in gparted.  What happened to the other 17 gigs?

Thanks for any help.

2 Reply by nimble

  • nimble
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-30
  • Posts: 3

Re: 250 gig hard drive shows up as 232 gig?

I should add that after it's formatted it shows up as 227.7 GB.  It has no data on it.

3 Reply by JoshuaW

  • JoshuaW
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-29
  • Posts: 2

Re: 250 gig hard drive shows up as 232 gig?

It's very simple, HD makers count by powers of 10, computers count by powers of 2
1 GB for a hard drive = 1,000,000,000 bytes
1 GB for a computer = 1,073,741,824 bytes
its a difference of about 73*10^6 bytes per GB, since you have 250GB that's 73M*250 = 18.25G,

4 Reply by nimble

  • nimble
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-30
  • Posts: 3

Re: 250 gig hard drive shows up as 232 gig?

Thanks, that helps explain some of what's going, though there seems to be an extra 5g missing that is unaccounted for.

Also, when it was formatted as fat32 and had 21g of music files on it, the drive was listed as having 217 available, which is only 10 less than I have now.  So I had more space with fat32....

5 Reply by class413

  • class413
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-25
  • Posts: 2,376

Re: 250 gig hard drive shows up as 232 gig?

I recently bought a Seagate "320GB" HD, really about 320 billions of bytes, that's something like 300GB
(1kB = 1024Bytes, 1MB = 1024x1024B etc).

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***