Dell 40g Hard Drive

**hweadie** · 8th March 2005

Just Got A Dell 3000 Dim With A 40g Hard Drive But The Total Volume Is 34.4g Dell Say This Is Right But I Dont Can Any Shednsome Light

**whatnow** · 8th March 2005

yeah mate m,all hard discs are like that. It's becuase there are 1024 bytes in a mega byte (MB) and 1024MB in a gigabyte, so 1GB is actually 0.9765625 MB when most people (for no reason) seem to think it's just 1000MB. This is why a 40GB HD comes out as 34GB...if that makes sense

another example is my 200GB HD coming out as 189. I thought I got ripped too with my first 40GB drive but don't worry all your bytes are taken care of.

**BertRoot** · 8th March 2005

You should also remember that the file system, FAT or NTFS, also takes up a certain wee percentage of the drive as well. Can't lay my hands on the figures I used to have but it is worth remembering.

**apllrd** · 9th March 2005

i have 2 80gb's mounted on raid using w2k and ntfs but i only get 149gb usable.
still 5.6gb seems a bit high. i used to have a pc with a 'miser' partition that works similar
to windows hibernate (but a heck of a lot faster) that used up a little more than the total ram value
on the HD.
i'm not sure if dell employ anything like this though.