Dotan Cohen wrote:
One good thing that I can say about the Maxtor drive is that 160 GB
turned out to be a little over 163 usable gigabytes. The 160 GB WD
unit has about 152 usable gigabytes of storage.
Well that pretty much confirms it was a drive geometry error.
Formatted (usable) drive space is (without exception) *never* *more*
than the quoted capacity ... *ever*. Apart from the fact that
manufactures always use the decimal 1000x rather than 1024x figures for
quoted capacities, which makes them look (in the advertising) bigger
than they actually are, once the drive has a disklabel and filesystem on
it, the capacity is reduced even further by the overhead.
So the fact that the partitioning software (fdisk or whatever) was
reporting a larger available capacity than the quoted capacity, means
AFAIAC that the geometry was being reported incorrectly. Maybe the drive
doesn't properly support LBA (which would be unusual nowadays), maybe
the mobo BIOS had the CHS value set manually (you should check that it's
on "auto"), who knows. I know that figure *has* to be wrong though.
-
K.
