Hard drive problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter necrosensual
  • Start date Start date
N

necrosensual

New member
I just got a Seagate 300GB drive to go into a firewire/USB enclosure, I got it installed, and initialized. My question is why does windows say the capacity is 279GB not 300GB. Thats a prety big difference, my internal drive on my laptop is only 40gb, so half of that is missing on the external. WTF!

Also what format should I have used for it to be recognised by both Macs at school, and my PC at home. It is currently NTSC, but my only other choice was FAT32, is that all there is?
 
There are always variations in actual vs. stated sizes, usually not in your favor. One of reasons is that we typcially say 1k is about 1,000 bytes, 1 meg is about 1,000,000 bytes, etc. (i.e., we speak as though things increase by orders of 10). In truth, 1k is 2 to the tenth power, which is actually 1024 bytes, and 1 meg is 2^20, which is actually 1,048,576 bytes. Marketing departments have been known to abuse this disparity. Partly, though, the amount of (usable) space on drives of the same model seem to vary a bit...
 
Windows xp is also a problem, especially if you only have Service Pack 1, which doesn't recognize more than 140gig out of a hard drive. Correct me if i'm wrong, but I thing SP2 has still some limits on it.
 
SP2 has been known to be a prick with firewire audio (or video for that matter) connected devices. I had a bad time where things would crash because the firewire input was only letting a fraction of the data pass through. Anyway, there are patches you can get that will fix all that. I can give you a link for the patch that you need to use after you get SP2:

http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/kb/kb2005243.asp

It's a 'cakewalk' site, but all the links are there

Everything is fine now...and yeah, HD's are like that. I suppose the difference is bigger the bigger the HD. My 80g reads actually only 75 or something. Even my little 256mb usb card reads 240mb...feels like a gyp
 
Thanks everyone, I figured it would just be one of those things that just are like that, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I have another much worse problem, but I'll put it into a new thread.
 
if you want it to be compatible with both pc's and mac's you will have to format it to fat32...this will however make your hard drives performance suffer some.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top