How to get the most space out of a new hard drive?

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by wheelstb, Dec 22, 2010.

  1. wheelstb

    wheelstb Regular member

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    I just got a 2 TB hard drive. However when I go into the disk management window in Windows 7 the drive only shows 1863 free gigabytes. Is there anyway I can maximize the drive space so I can get more out of it? I don't want to give up 137 GB.

    And also would it be better for me to format as GTP or MBR? I plan to use the drive to store videos TV shows movies and other large files.
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2010
    wheelstb, Dec 22, 2010
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  2. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    This is as big as you are going to get...all the hard drive manufacturers consider a terabyte to be 1000000000000 bytes. In reality, a terabtye is 1099511627776 bytes. Thus, your 2000GB drive is actually only 1862.645GB.
     
    KillerBug, Dec 22, 2010
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  3. Deadrum33

    Deadrum33 Active member

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    GPT since its storage only. MBR (master boot record)doesnt like such large partitions and since you are not booting off the drive anyway, GPT
     
    Deadrum33, Dec 22, 2010
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  4. wheelstb

    wheelstb Regular member

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    Thank you guys. You learn something new everyday.

    It just seems to me like overstating your hard drive capacity by over 150 GB is a little shady.
     
    wheelstb, Dec 23, 2010
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  5. Deadrum33

    Deadrum33 Active member

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    You are welcome. Yes it is shady about over-stating hard drive capacity, but look at it this way. Normal people count by 10's, 100's, 1000's, deci, centi, kilo, and along comes a device where a 1GB doesnt equal 1000 of something smaller, its 1024.
    Yes its sucks when you first learn about it and realize it, but you get used to it for convenience in naming.
     
    Deadrum33, Dec 23, 2010
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  6. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    Yeah, but who cares how normal people count? If we are going based on that, then hard drives would not work because there would be no zero (most people start counting at one). Anyway, they design these disks to the sales size...it isn't like they designed the largest platter they could, stacked up four of them, and it just happened to come to exactly 3TB. If they wanted to make drives that are as big as they claim to be, they could...they just don't.

    To be fair, everyone does it...even flash drives do this, but it is a lot less noticeable with GB than with TB. If some company decided to be honest about capacity, and to sell their 2TB drives as 1.862TB drives, they would loose customers to other brands selling drives that claim to be larger...and if they actually made a 2TB drive, it would probably cost more than a fake 2TB drive, and loose sales that way.
     
    KillerBug, Dec 24, 2010
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  7. mrslicker

    mrslicker Regular member

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    i thought some space was lost in the formatting process as well, less so when the formatting is of a newer type. is this true?
     
    mrslicker, Dec 30, 2010
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