Computers & Networking

[smokinsammy]

I bought the Asus u56e bbl6 laptop and since all your literature says it has a 640 gb drive i decided to verify, well it seems to have a max of 571 gb. 571 is the max before any is deducted. Hopefully this is a problem with this machine only, because i plan to exchange it for one that has the stated 640.

[hockeycanuckjc Trusted Contributor]

Aside from the recovery partition, you may wish to read about how hard drive space in the real world is calculated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Units_of_storage_capacity

[RealGeorgeW Valued Expert]

Give Hockey's link a read. This isn't falsehood, it's simply semantics in how drives are formatted, and the conversion. This has been the standard since hard drives were first developed.

[RealGeorgeW Valued Expert]

I'll kinda expand on the wiki page since it's a bit long of a read.

The manufacturer claims 640GB, using the GB to mean giga, = billion. So there is 640 billion bytes. This is where the conversion happens.

640billion bytes / 1024(the number of bytes in a KB) = 625 million MB
625million KB / 1024(the number also of KB in a MB) = 610,351MB
610,351MB/ / 1024(number of MB in a GB = 596GB < what is actually fully available to your computer before formatting.

As Hockey said, there's also a recovery partition(that is hidden) that does usually run about 15-20GB, and there you are at your 571GB of usable space.

[smokinsammy]

Okay thanks guys, i  still don't really get it, but you know more than i do. .. Thanks for the info, very much appreciated.

[RealGeorgeW Valued Expert · Accepted solution]

NP, it's actually a common question, and yeah, it's confusing as to why they do it.