Why is it that when I format a hard drive, the volume always turns out 1-2 gigs less than it supposed to be?

 

your computer needs a certain amount of space to just keep track of the rest.

Thats why a 60 gig drive after formatting comes up as 57 gigs. Those 3 gigs are used to keep track of the other 57.

Currently some guy is suing a hard drive manufacturer claiming false advertising...(which is true)

 

^what he said.

My brother formatted his hard drive so many times that he lost almost half the space on it.

 

The reason is the difference between measuring a drive size in binary vs decimal.

Hard drive manufactures defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes

Microsoft usually defines a gigabyte as 1024 * 1024 * 1024 ( or 1,073,741,824 ) bytes.

You should not lose space on a hard drive after formatting unless the drive is finding a large amount of physical errors. Those errors are marked as bad and the space is lost. Generally this is not noticable. If it is noticable, you'll more likely be buying a new drive.

The file system does resever space for itself, but it is no where near 3 gigs. For example if you convert your drive to a dynamic disk in windows, the space reserved is about 1 MB at the end of the drive.

There is also slack space, but that doesn't seem like the question you asked.


Good info here on defining drive space.

Good info on slack space.

 

lol thats not possible

 

youre right im sorry. wrong thing.

He had so many bad sectors on his hard drive he lost half the space.

dunno what I was thinking.

 

Tell him not to be a cheap-ass and buy a new disk before he loses something important.

 

He did, he bought a whole new computer.