# [SOLVED]Size of my new usb hard drive: only 465GB out of 500

## dryadcito

Well, the title says almost everything. We're talking about a western digital elite passport 500GB. First thing I did was copying the software it had installed into other hd, and second was fdisk. I assigned 350GB to a first partition, and the rest to a second one. Now I've seen the second one has only 115GB, and I'm not really happy. Is there any nice reason for those 35GB to be missing in action? I know there's something I'm not taking into account, but what?

By the way, the entries in the partition table:

```

fdisk /dev/sdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 60801.

There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,

and could in certain setups cause problems with:

1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)

2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs

   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x44fdfe06

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sdb1               1       45691   367012926   83  Linux

/dev/sdb2           45692       60801   121371075    7  HPFS/NTFS

```

The partitions with the size in a more human friendly format

```

df -h | grep sdb

/dev/sdb2             116G   69M  116G   1% /mnt/win/wd

/dev/sdb1             351G   41G  310G  12% /mnt/wdusb

```

Last edited by dryadcito on Thu Aug 20, 2009 5:20 pm; edited 1 time in total

----------

## pigeon768

That's normal. Your hard drive is 500,000,000,000 bytes and df is reporting 500,000,000,000 / 1024^3 = 465.66 GiB.

----------

## dryadcito

Oh well, the problem is... I didn't buy the western digital my passport elite 500,000,000,000 bytes, but the western digital my passport elite 500GB. I didn't try  to check how many bytes were 500GB because of that. I understand your explanation but... do you find this to be "normal"??? I mean... is not the first time you see something like this???

----------

## xaviermiller

Yes, all hard drive manufacturers do that.

The "M, G, T, P" prefixes are powers of 10 (x 1000) in place of powers of 2 (x 1024).

This is purely a commercial argument to show the contents bigger than it is...

----------

## pigeon768

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Consumer_confusion

----------

## dryadcito

Ok, but the fact that all manufacturers do that is not an excuse. It says 500GB, and that's what I bought.

In that wiki page I've read this:

```
The settlement called for Western Digital to add a disclaimer;[90] flash memory and hard disk manufacturers have disclaimers on their packaging and web sites clarifying the formatted capacity of the flash memory[50] or defining MB as 1 million bytes and 1 GB as 1 billion bytes.[92]
```

But in this package I don't see anything like that (I'm not from the USA, so I know it just doesn't apply here), except that it says 500 GB/Go. Is that "Go" supposed to mean anything?

By the way, thank you for the really quick answers so far!

----------

## pigeon768

 *dryadcito wrote:*   

> Ok, but the fact that all manufacturers do that is not an excuse. It says 500GB, and that's what I bought.

  The trouble is that the IEC and IEEE define it that way. I'm not saying it's right - it's just the way it is.  *dryadcito wrote:*   

> Is that "Go" supposed to mean anything?

  Nope.

----------

## dryadcito

Ok, thank you all for the answers... I've added some people to my hate list (not you, of course). One last question... do absolutely every vendor count bytes this way? Is there anyone doing it the other way? Thank you in advance... I'll tag this as solved.

----------

## eccerr0r

I think all manufacturers/service providers that build stuff/provide stuff in non multiples of 2 will use 10^x notation, while ones that do will use 2^x notation.  This may or may not account for spare capacity.

So, all these tend to be 10^x:

* all magnetic/mechanical hdd manufacturers.  I don't remember who was the first to do it but all manufacturers since then followed suit.

* cable,dsl, dialup,... internet

* wireless

* network cards

Watch out for bits and bytes too...

All these tend to be 2^x:

* DRAM, SRAM, hardware RAM disks

* Flash EEPROM, USB FLASH memory, CF, etc.

* Solid State Drives (I don't know how long it will last like this since they're competing against mechanicals, especially since these also can have spare blocks that eat into the 2^x number)

----------

## krinn

 *pigeon768 wrote:*   

>  *dryadcito wrote:*   Is that "Go" supposed to mean anything?  Nope.

 

in fact yes, it means GigaOctects, octect=byte in france, europeans version might show Go instead of GB

So it means your drive should be sell in european country, and specially near/or within france.

----------

