size of hard drive?

[Wayne Oxtoby]

I have a Compaq 5423US machine. The product information says it possesses an 80GB UltraDMA Hard Drive. The system came preconfigured - partitioned with a "C" Drive and a "D" 'System Save' Drive.

When I check system properties in My Computer, the C Drive shows a total of 70.6GB and the D Drive shows a total of 3.89GB.

Granted, math is not my strong suit but I believe that totals 74.49GB. On an 80GB drive, where is the 'missing' 5.51GB??

Your help is greatly appreciated.

[Alzhy · Accepted solution]

Vendor/Marketing storage capacity are not true computer-speak sizes:

Marketing:
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes

Compuer-Speak:
1Gb = 1024*1024*1024 == 107,3741,824 bytes

So 80 GB is actually:

80,000,000,000 divided by 107,3741,824 = 74.5 true Computer-speak Gigabytes.

The 1GB difference is due to FIlesystem overhead on your NTFS partitions.

[Wayne Oxtoby]

Nelson,

Thanks for your assistance. Leave it to the marketing gurus to mold a mathematical numbering system to suit their purposes. Thanks for your time and expertise.

Wayne