[ale] Hard Drive Size

[Mike Murphy]

my guess: that's your disks formatted and partitioned size. There are 2 
issues here:

1. harddrive manufacturers don't count data space the same way everyone 
else does. To a harddrive manufacturer, 1 gigabyte is literally 1000 
megabytes, not what it should be, 1024 megabytes. So the actual 
available space on the disk come out being a little less than what its 
advertised as being.

2. There is overhead involved in formatting/partitioning a drive, which 
eats a little space. The full explanation for this is somewhat lengthy 
and technical, but suffice it to say, in order for you operating system 
of choice (by way of the cpu, the ide/scsi/sata controller, etc) to be 
able to read and write the disk, some of it has to be reserved for 
purposes other than storing data (there is also some redundancy built in 
here.

So, for instance, I have a couple of "30 gigabyte" drives in my machine 
at home, but after formatting, etc. they have 28G useable (actually, 
about 28,800,000 k, give or take, and one is a little different from the 
other). In my experience, 76G sounds about right for an "80 gigabyte" 
hard drive.

Mike


Brandon Colbert wrote:
> Jerald Sheets wrote:
> 
>> That is indeed an oddity.
>>
>> Is it possible the translation your BIOS has used is off a bit?
>>
>> Also, are you using a default partitioning scheme, or are you using 
>> custom
>> partitioning via Disk Druid?
>>
>> Jerald M. Sheets jr.
>> Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator
>> McKesson, Inc.
>> (404) 293-8762
>> **********
>>  
>>
>>
>>
>>  
>>
> I am using a custom partition. (LVM)
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

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Mike Murphy
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