I have a 320gb drive which had all the gb before I got it fixed, this includes windows installed.  Being that 1 gb is larger then 1000 I know that there is more on the drive then there really is.  But after resolving a problem I can only see 298 gb which means that I missing 22 gb.  I need as much space as possible cause this is a GAMING pc.Patio has a great table showing this but this is normal...so to speak...

Are you sure you had exactly 320GB before you 'got it fixed'?

For example, my 80 GB HARD Disk is only 74.5 GBSee the attached for true binary capacities of drives.



[recovering disk space -- attachment deleted by admin] Quote from: Dusty on June 30, 2008, 04:25:44 PM

See the attached for true binary capacities of drives.

According to HDD MANUFACTURER:
320 GB = 320 * 1000000000 = 320000000000 bytes

According to Operating System:

320000000000 bytes = 320000000000 / 1024 = 312500000 KB
312500000 KB = 312500000 / 1024 = 305175.78 MB
305175.78 MB = 305175.78 / 1024 = 298.02 GB

Consumer confusion

As of 2007, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disks and Flash disks define 1 gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate a gigabyte by dividing the bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1,073,741,824. This distinction is a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may have its capacity reported by the operating system as only 372 GB, depending on the type of report.

The difference between units based on SI and binary prefixes increases exponentially — in other words, an SI kilobyte is nearly 98% as much as a KIBIBYTE, but a megabyte is under 96% as much as a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% as much as a gibibyte. This means that a 500 GB hard disk drive would appear as "465 GB". As storage sizes get larger and higher units are used, this difference will become more pronounced.

An example, take a hard drive that can store exactly 250×109 or 250 billion bytes after formatting. Generally, operating systems calculate disk and file sizes using binary numbers, so this 250 GB drive would be reported as "232.83 GB". The result is that there is a significant discrepancy between what the consumer believes they have purchased and what their operating system says they have.

Some consumers feel short-changed when they discover the difference, and claim that manufacturers of drives and data transfer devices are using the decimal measurements in an intentionally misleading way to inflate their numbers. Several legal disputes have been waged over the confusion.