Not using all of 640GB HD

[bkovacevich]

Built my new system with a Western Digital 640GB "Green" SATA drive, but Fedora 5 only sees ~600GB in LVM. I know that some HD space is used for disk management, but 6.25% of the drive space? SATA mode in BIOS is currently set to IDE, as that's the only way I could get the drive recognized - is this part of the problem? Also, should I be using the AHCI/Linux option for SATA mode?

Thanks in advance,

[HROAdmin26]

An HDD listed at "640GB" by a drive manufacturer holds 640,000,000,000 bytes. Meaning that drive makers use 1000 bytes = 1 KB (decimal).

Computers use 1024 bytes = 1KB (binary). So that 640 "GB" drive formats out to about 596 GB as far as the computer is concerned. Same storage space - two measurement methods.

This is available many times over in Google. Because so many people were "confused" naturally a lawsuit ensued.

Although Western Digital maintained that their usage of units is consistent with "the indisputably correct industry standard for measuring and describing storage capacity", and that they "cannot be expected to reform the software industry", they agreed to settle in March 2006 with June 14, 2006 as the Final Approval hearing date.[89]

Western Digital offered to compensate customers with a free download of backup and recovery software valued at US$30. They also paid $500,000 in fees and expenses to San Francisco lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, who filed the suit.[90]

Western Digital had this footnote in their settlement. "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a "dozen," because some bakers would view a "dozen" as including 13 items."[91]

And as per the norm, only lawyers profited from this.

[bkovacevich]

Sorta like a "pound" of coffee only being 12 ounces ...

Thanks for the clarification, I will keep that in mind when purchasing future HDs.

[HROAdmin26]

This is not "new math." It has been the standard for *a long time.*

And if you want to blame anyone, it appears that would be *Apple.*

In the early days of computers there was little or no consumer confusion because of the sophisticated nature of the consumers and the practice of computer manufacturers to specify their products with capacities in full precision, e.g., the 1968 IBM stated System 360 "Model 91s can accommodate up to 6 291 496 bytes of main storage."[33]

Hard disk drive manufacturers used MB, i.e. 106 bytes, to characterize their products as early as 1974.[34] By 1977, in its first edition, Disk/Trend, a leading hard disk drive industry marketing consultancy segmented the industry according to MBs (decimal sense) of capacity.[35]

The presentation of hard disk drive capacity by an operating system using MB in a binary sense appears no earlier than Macintosh Finder after 1984. Prior to that, on the systems that had a hard disk drive, capacity was presented in decimal digits with no prefix of any sort (e.g., MS/PC DOS CHKDSK command).

The first comment is also noteworthy. Apparently it is *the industry's fault* for the lack of understanding on the *consumer's* part.

[bkovacevich]

Ah, I miss the good ol' days when men were men, screens were green, a pound of coffee was 16 ounces and a Gigabyte was 1024**3 ...