Why is My Computer’s Hard Drive Smaller Than It’s Supposed to Be
In this article you’ll get a regular language explanation of an idea that’s confusing to people pretty often. First, I will define two easy computer terms you might find helpful.
I will also explain why there seems to be a discrepancy between the size of a hard drive when you get it, or what it says on the box it comes in, and how much its full size, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to be smaller.
First, I’m going to define a couple of computer terms. The terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of the terms fundamentally mean the same thing, therefore it’s fine to use them interchangeably.
A hard drive is the part inside the computer which actually contains all the information, your documents, pictures, music and the operating system of a computer itself, that might be Windows XP or Mac OS 10.4 or anything else. In most cases, everything that’s saved on the PC or Mac will be kept in the hard drive.
Hard drives have been measured for some time in gigabytes and are already moving into the terabyte range, which is one order of magnitude up from a gigabyte.
A byte is essentially the smallest unit of measurement with computers. A kilobyte is approximately 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is basically 1 million bytes. A gigabyte is approximately 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is basically 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to get a long way beyond there but not for a while yet, so forget about that for now.
For example, you have a machine that is years old. You may have the idea you have a certain sized drive based on the label on the computer, or the number on the receipt that you got when you bought the computer.
Let’s say you want to find out how big the drive is. When using a Macintosh, you can do this by clicking on the the drive icon on your desktop, then go to the File menu and then clicking on “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the capacity of the drive.
On a Windows computer, you double-click the My Computer icon and click once on the hard drive. It will usually say how big the drive is on the left side of the window.
If you want to see the steps, I suggest Windows Vista how to or Mac how to training, but specifically video lessons that show you the steps.
Once you know how big the drive is, it’s going to show up as less than what you think.
This is because of what happens when you prepare the drive for use. “Erasing” or “formatting” is the term for preparing the drive ready for use. Before this happens, the drive is kind of like a house pad before you build the house.
You can’t obviously live on a bare house pad because there are no walls or a roof. That’s what you do when you setup a hard disk. You “partition” and format it. Maybe you’ve heard the word partition as a screen which separates one half of a room from another. A partition is essentially the same thing.
When you partition and formart a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term works for you, you’re basically making the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you build the walls and the roof and you prepare it for use. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.
For the same reason, if you have a hard drive that isn’t erased, you can’t put anything on it because there aren’t any walls or roof.
If you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, prepping it to be used, as being like raising a house on of a foundation, you might already begin to guess why a hard drive’s size ends up seeming to be smaller.
It’s almost like you’ve lost space when you format it, when compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or the computer that came with that drive in it. You’ll find it says a larger number than you actually get when you looking at the drive’s size after it has been partitioned and formatted.
So if you start off with a foundation that’s one thousand square feet, after the walls are up, you don’t have all the full amount of square feet left any more, not in real, usable space. You have some of that space taken up by the walls.
Essentially , that’s what happens when you erase a drive. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, that space is lost. You’ll probably find it’s a pretty easy way to think of it, and it helps people understand.
Hopefully that clarifies things. A lot of my clients have asked me about it — this is how I explain it to them, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope it makes sense for you, too.
