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Is WINDOWS 7 accurate in reporting PC drive capacities?

I had my laptop crash and hard drive replaced. I loaded the WIN 7 OS using recovery disks I made from old hard drive. I checked computer properties and it showed that 339 GB of 360 GB was available. My hard disk is supposed to be 400 GB instead of 360 GB. Could it be that the OS is not recognizing the proper disk size, or do you think that the shop gave me a smaller hard disk - whatever was handy?

Update:

Thank you for replies - makes me feel a little more confident of what the store is saying. I went back to the shop and they basically told me about how the bites are not exactly round numbers, eg. 1024 bites = 1MB, etc....and then the thing about the hidden part of the drive taken up by the MTF etc.

2 Answers

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  • 1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    Just to inform you Most hard drives say they have more space then they actually have because some of the space is allocated to organization of the drive.

    Not all the space on a hard drive is available for user files. The operating system file system uses some of the disk space to organize files on the disk, recording their file names and the sequence of disk areas that represent the file. Examples of data structures stored on disk to retrieve files include the MS DOS file allocation table (FAT), and UNIX inodes, as well as other operating system data structures. This file system overhead is usually less than 1% on drives larger than 100 MB.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    NTFS has a MFT and that is what takes up the space you say is missing.

    New Technology File System, Master File Table

    AAS Computer Networking- Who doesn't regurgitate WIKIPEDIA Vomit

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