Formatted HD space way less than HD total?

Hi there,

I use Windows XP Pro 32 bit, service pack 2, Pent. 4 at 2.8 GH, ASUS mother
board, SATA HD(s) and USB 2.0. This is a custom system I built about 2 years
ago. My main drive is C:/ (500 gig), I formatted right out of the box. It
works as expected. The second drive I added (300 gig) was also brand new out
of the box. I formatted it using Windows Disk Manager. I noticed that when
it was finished formatting the Disk Manger told me that the 300 gig drive had
quite a bit less than 300 gigs but I attributed that to the disk reserving
space for it’s own disk management. This last weekend I installed a third
hard drive (750 gig). Again I used Windows Disk Manager to format the new
drive. After formatting the Disk Manager tells me 694.2 gigs are available.
That is 50 gigs unaccounted for. I have looked for hidden files on the disk
but none are reported. Both the 300 and 750 gig drives were formatted for
Basic, single partition, NTSF file structure – both are for data/file storage
only. All of my HD(s) are Western Digital Caviar series with SATA. Can
anyone tell me what I am doing wrong or where the missing HD gig space is
being allocated? And more importantly, how do I make those many, many gigs
available for my storage?

Thank you

"Tim L" <TimL.TakeThisOut@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:38DB661B-AF37-4274-8292-21C795ECF60C@microsoft.com...
> Hi there,
>
> I use Windows XP Pro 32 bit, service pack 2, Pent. 4 at 2.8 GH, ASUS
> mother
> board, SATA HD(s) and USB 2.0. This is a custom system I built about 2
> years
> ago. My main drive is C:/ (500 gig), I formatted right out of the box.
> It
> works as expected. The second drive I added (300 gig) was also brand new
> out
> of the box. I formatted it using Windows Disk Manager. I noticed that
> when
> it was finished formatting the Disk Manger told me that the 300 gig drive
> had
> quite a bit less than 300 gigs but I attributed that to the disk reserving
> space for it's own disk management. This last weekend I installed a third
> hard drive (750 gig). Again I used Windows Disk Manager to format the new
> drive. After formatting the Disk Manager tells me 694.2 gigs are
> available.
> That is 50 gigs unaccounted for. I have looked for hidden files on the
> disk
> but none are reported. Both the 300 and 750 gig drives were formatted for
> Basic, single partition, NTSF file structure - both are for data/file
> storage
> only. All of my HD(s) are Western Digital Caviar series with SATA. Can
> anyone tell me what I am doing wrong or where the missing HD gig space is
> being allocated? And more importantly, how do I make those many, many
> gigs
> available for my storage?

It's the Marketing Department's fault. Here's the deal: To bump their
numbers up, hard drive manufacturers define 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
However, historically in CS we use multiples of 1,024 to define memory.
This means that 1 GB in CS terms is 1,024 * 1,024 * 1,024 = 1,073,741,824
bytes. The OS is reporting the memory in multiples of 1,024, while the hard
drive manufacturer's marketing department is inflating their numbers by
using multiples of 1,000 even. If you multiply the 694.2 number by (1,024 *
1,024 * 1,024), you'll get 745,391,574,220.8, which is much closer to your
expected 750 GB. The difference can probably be accounted for by rounding.