New WD 160 GB Hard Drive.. Only 130 GB!?

[SlyGuy12]

Hello, my friend recently purchased this drive and when we put it in his computer it only had 131 GB on it.. WHY!?

[ktkendall]

Hi SlyGuy;
When you FDISKed it, what did it report as capacity. There is probably a 130G limitation in his BIOS.
KK

[RJ]

Well, hard drive manufacturers "lie". The drive has no 160 GB, it has 160 BB (billion bytes), falsely indicated as GB.
Kilo, Mega, Giga etc. are normally a factor of 1000. In the computer system it is 1024.

But the hard drive manufacturers use 1000, but Windows reports the correct size using 1024 as the factor.

So, let's do it.

160 GB -> 160000 MB -> 160000000 KB -> 160000000000 Bytes

Now, using 1024, we calculate the real capacity.

160000000000 Bytes = 156250000 KB = 152587,890625 MB = 149,011 GB.

So 149 GB is the real capacity.
Hmm. So when you get 131, there are still 18 GB missing. It's probably indeed a BIOS issue.

RJ

[Jomama]

Hmm. So when you get 131, there are still 18 GB missing.

Its done with mirrors. I know that with Maxtor, you must use Maxblast to see the remaining 18G. If you use FDISK you dont. The trick is in the propriatary partioning/formating SW

[HAL9000]

Regardless, once in Windows, you will still see a calculation based on the true numbers and receive the true capacity.

It's a BIOS limitation and quite common after 128Gb.

[Markoman01027]

FDISK always found the wrong size of my 80GB IBM hard drive until I loaded the OS, which stated the size(76GB)

[Nuclear Krusader]

If you use the newest version of FDISK, Matt, you won't have that problem.

[glc]

You have a bios limitation - the best way around this one is a controller card.