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Why does my hard drive appear smaller than expected?

Read on if you'd like to know...

  • Why the hard drive built into your PC, or the hard drive you've bought, seems smaller than advertised.

In Brief...
FOR PC's or LAPTOPS

  • You may find that the hard drive in a PC or Laptop is reported as being anything up to 20GB less than the original website description. This is quite often due to there being a reserved "partition" on the hard drive which contains all the operating system installation and associated (or bundled) software and a recovery area. You can check this by double clicking "My Computer" and checking for additional drive letters which may be holding the remainder of the hard disk space.

FOR AN INTERNAL HARD DRIVE OR EXTERNAL STAND ALONE HARD DRIVE

  • Your operating system software takes 1Mb (megabyte) to be equal to 1,048,576 bytes. Hard disk manufacturers on the other hand, assume that 1Mb is equal to 1,000,000 bytes. For example, a 320GB hard disk may be reported as 305GB by the operating system.

Further information...

It's important to note that the act of partitioning and formatting the drive will result in the available capacity being reduced even before any user data is written. This is entirely normal and is due to the overhead incurred in preparing a hard drive for use.

We suggest that you do not attempt to either partition or format your drive unless you are technically competent, as the process can be destructive.

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