What’s The Reason Your Hard Drive Is Smaller Than The Label Says
In this article you’ll get a plain language explanation of an idea that confuses people pretty frequently. First, I’m going to define a pair of computer terms so you’ll get the most out of this article.
I will also straighten out why there is a discrepancy between the size of a hard disk when you buy it, or what’s on the label on the drive, and how much its capacity, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to not be as big.
First, I’m going to define a couple of computer terms. The two terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of these terms basically have the same meaning, so it’s OK to use them interchangeably.
The hard disk is the part in your computer that really holds all the information, your documents, pictures, music and the operating system of a computer itself, that might be Windows or OS X or anything else. Generally speaking, everything that’s stored in a PC is going to be located on the hard drive.
Hard disks have been measured for quite some time in gigabytes and are now well on their way into the terabyte range, which is the next level after gigabytes.
A byte is pretty much the smallest unit of measurement when it comes to computers. A kilobyte is around one thousand bytes. A megabyte is approximately 1 million bytes. A gigabyte is approximately 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is approximately 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to go beyond there but not for a while yet, so forget about that .
Let’s say you have a computer that is years old. You may have the idea you have a certain sized drive based on the label on the computer, or the specifications on the sheet of paper that you got when you ordered the machine.
So say you want to find out the size of the drive. When using a Mac, you can do this by clicking on the the drive icon on your desktop, going to the File menu and going to “Get Info.” That opens a window with the size of the hard drive..
If you’re on a Windows computer, you double-click the My Computer icon and select the hard drive. It will usually say what the size of the drive is on the left-hand side of the window.
If you find seeing something done is easier than reading the steps, I suggest Windows Vista how to or Mac OSX how to lessons, but specifically video lessons so you can watch the steps and learn.
Once you know how big the drive is, it will turn out smaller than it seems like it should be.
This is because of what happens when you set up the drive for use. “Erasing” or “formatting” is getting the drive ready to be used. Before this happens, the drive is almost like the foundation of a house or a house pad before the house is built.
You can’t obviously live a house pad because there aren’t any walls and no roof. So in other words, that’s what happens when you format a hard drive. You “partition” and format it. You may have heard the word partition as a screen which separates one part of a room from another. A partition is basically the same thing.
When you partition and formart a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term you prefer, you’re essentially building the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you put up the walls and the roof and you get it ready for use. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.
For much the same reason, if you have a hard drive that’s not partitioned and formatted, you can’t put anything on to it because there aren’t any walls or roof.
So if you think about erasing or formatting a drive, that is, preparing it to be used, as being like putting a house on top of a house pad, you might already begin to understand why a hard drive’s size ends up seeming to be smaller.
It’s almost as if you’ve lost space when you format it, when compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or the machine that came with that drive installed in it. You’ll find it says a larger size than you seem to have when you looking at the drive’s size after it’s been partitioned and formatted.
So if you start off with a foundation that is a thousand square feet, after the walls are up, you no longer have 1,000 square feet left any more, not in practical, usable space. You’ve got some of the space taken up by the walls.
Essentially speaking, that’s what happens when you erase a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, some space is lost. You’ll find it’s a simple way to think about it, and it helps people understand.
Hopefully that makes sense and clears up a little bit of a mystery. Many of my clients have asked me about it that’s the way I explain it, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope that makes sense to you, too.
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