Western Digital 640GB Hard drive Showing as 596GB

m3incorp

m3incorp

New Member
When I launch Disc Management, these are the numbers that I get:

Used Space 54,501,568,512 bytes 50.7GB

Free Space 585,630,941,376 bytes 545GB

Capacity 640,132,575,232 bytes 596GB

How come the descreptency between the bytes and the GB. Everywhere it's showing as a 596GB Hard drive.

I am using Windows Vista Premium 64 bit with SP1.

Can anyone tell me the reason for this?
 
I'm in the computer forensics field, and we are trying to shift the commonly used MB (MegaByte) terminology, to MiB (MibiByte), KiB (KibiByte), and GiB (GibiBye).

These terms represent the true 1024 Bytes which make a KiB, 1024 KiB which make a Gib etc.

Its confusing, but yea, manufactures measure space in increments of 1000's, while the computer world uses 1024's. When we're talking about Terrabytes, that extra 24 is quite a bit of space.
 
Whenever a hard drive is formatted it will have approximately 93 percent of the advertised storage space. It is not also not wise to fill a hard drive up to more than 90 percent of its capacity as you can corrupt data and crash the hard drive. So in reality, you only have about 536 gigabytes of usable hard drive space.
 
tyttebøvs said:
I have tried filling my drives up 100% many times without anything happening (other than the "out of harddrive space" message).
Click to expand...

I've read about other people losing all their data filling up a hard drive all the way. It also isn't good to do it as I think you need at least 10 percent of a hard drive free to defragment it.
 
2048Megabytes said:
I've read about other people losing all their data filling up a hard drive all the way. It also isn't good to do it as I think you need at least 10 percent of a hard drive free to defragment it.
Click to expand...

Yep - I've also been past the 93 % mark and my PC was running incredibly slow - but never had any crashes.
 
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