Here's a little problem I'm facing with my new western digital 120gb hard drive (8mb buffer). In the Bios it shows it as a 120gb hard drive. When I loaded windows xp onto it, It says that it's only a total of 111gb? What happened to those 9 other gigs? Is this normal? Is there a way I can get this space back. My last laptop three years ago only had a 6gb hard drive so 9gb is lot of space to me! Thanks
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xp eating harddrive space?
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BITS vs. BYTES !!!
it's just the way that it's calculated...
the bigger the hd, the more difference you see...with a small hd, you'll "lose" a couple mb, but with the new, larger hds, you see a "loss" of a few gb....
but don't worry, it's not lost, because it was never there to start with....SPAM Special Ops
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You weren't actually far wrong, if you had of kept explaining you might have got it right. :)
All the different values (kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, etc..) are calculated by using 2. Probably doesn't make sense, but try this:
1 Kilobyte = 2^10 (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2) =1,024 bytes.
1 Megabyte = 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes
1 Gigabyte = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes
Whereas when manufacturers put sizes, they simply round off to the nearest big number... ie:
1 Kilobyte = 1,000 bytes
1 Megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes
1 Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes
Now there was soem talk that the manufacturer sizes used a different notation to show what size it was (Gb instead of GB, or something like that) but I've got no idea about that.
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here's some more info...
Prefixes for binary multiples
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Factor Name Symbol Origin Derivation
210 kibi Ki kilobinary: (210)1 kilo: (103)1
220 mebi Mi megabinary: (210)2 mega: (103)2
230 gibi Gi gigabinary: (210)3 giga: (103)3
240 tebi Ti terabinary: (210)4 tera: (103)4
250 pebi Pi petabinary: (210)5 peta: (103)5
260 exbi Ei exabinary: (210)6 exa: (103)6
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Examples and comparisons with SI prefixes
one kibibit 1 Kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit
one kilobit 1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit
one mebibyte 1 MiB = 220 B = 1 048 576 B
one megabyte 1 MB = 106 B = 1 000 000 B
one gibibyte 1 GiB = 230 B = 1 073 741 824 B
one gigabyte 1 GB = 109 B = 1 000 000 000 B
bad copy & paste from HereSPAM Special Ops
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