hard drive smaller
This article will give you an easy to understand explanation of a computer concept which is confusing to people pretty often. First, I will demystify a couple of easy computer terms it’ll be helpful for you to know.
I’ll also clarify why there seems to be a difference between the size of a computer’s hard disk when you order it, or what is on the label on the drive, and how much its capacity, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to be smaller.
First, let me define a couple of computer terms. These terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of these terms basically have the same meaning — therefore it’s fine to use them interchangeably.
A hard disk is the part in your computer which actually stores everything, your documents, pictures, music and the critical system files of your computer itself, that could be Windows Vista or Mac OS 10.4 or anything else. Usually, everything that’s saved on a computer will be found on the hard drive.
Hard disks have been measured for years in gigabytes and are already moving into the terabyte range, which is a thousand times larger than a gigabyte.
A byte is basically the smallest unit of measurement for computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte). A kilobyte is approximately 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is basically 1,000,000 bytes. A gigabyte is just about 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is basically 1 trillion bytes. It’ll go far beyond there but not for a while yet, so forget about that for now.
You might have a machine that is years old. You might think you have a specific amount of storage space on your hard drive based on the label on the computer, or the number on the receipt that you got when you bought the machine.
So if you want to find out how big the drive is. When using a Mac, you can do this by selecting the the hard drive icon, going to the File menu and going to “Get Info.” That will tell you the size or capacity of the drive.
On a Windows computer, you double-click the Computer icon and click once on the hard drive. It’ll generally say what the size of the drive is on the left side of the window.
If you’re not sure how this works, I suggest Windows Vista how to or Apple how to, but specifically video lessons so you can actually see the steps.
Once you know how big the drive is, you’ll find it’s smaller than you think.
This is because of what happens when the drive is first set up for use. “Formatting” or “erasing” is preparing the drive ready for use. Before this happens, the drive is sort of like a house pad before the house is built.
Obviously, you can’t live on a bare house pad since there aren’t any walls or roof. So that’s what happens when you setup a hard disk. You “partition” and format it. You may have heard the word partition as a panel that divides one part of a room from another. A partition is fundamentally the same thing.
When a person partition and format a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term you prefer, you’re basically making the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you build the walls and the roof and you get it all ready for use. Until you do that, no one can live in it.
For much the same reason, if you have a hard drive that’s not partitioned and formatted, you can’t put anything there because it doesn’t have any walls or roof.
If you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, setting it up for use, as being like raising a house on top of a foundation, you might already begin to guess why a hard drive’s size seems smaller than it should be.
It’s almost as if you’ve lost space when you format it, compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or on the outside of the computer that came with that drive inside it. You’ll find it says a bigger number than you seem to have when you checking the drive’s size after it’s been formatted.
So in other words you begin with a house pad that’s a thousand square feet, once you put up the walls, you don’t have 1,000 square feet left any more, not in actual, usable space. You’ve got some of the space taken up by the walls.
Basically , that’s what happens when you setup a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, it loses a little bit of that space. You’ll probably find it’s a pretty good way to think of it, and it helps people understand.
I hope that makes sense. Many of my clients have asked about it that’s how I explain it to them, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope that makes some sense for you, too.