Explanation of Why Hard Disk Seems Smaller Than It Should Be
Reading this article will give you an easy to grasp explanation of a basic computer concept that’s confusing to people pretty often. First, I will explain some computer terms so you’ll get the most out of this article.
I will also explain why there is a difference between the size of your computer’s hard disk when you order it, or what’s on the label on your computer, and how much its capacity, when you’re there looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to be smaller.
First, I’ll just define a couple of computer terms. These terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of the terms essentially are synonymous, so you can use them interchangeably.
A hard drive is the part of the computer which actually stores all the information, your documents, pictures, music and the OS of the computer itself, that could be Windows or Mac OS X or anything else. Usually, everything that’s stored in the computer will be located in the hard drive.
Hard disks have been measured for quite some time in gigabytes and are already moving into the terabyte range, which is one order of magnitude up from a gigabyte.
A byte is essentially the smallest unit of measurement with computers (only bits are smaller than bytes). A kilobyte is around 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is basically 1 million bytes. A gigabyte is basically 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is essentially 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to go a long way beyond that but not for a while yet, so let’s not worry about it for the time being.
Let’s say you have a computer that is years old. You might think you have a certain sized drive based on the label on the computer, or the specs on the sheet of paper that you got when you ordered the computer.
So say you want to find out how big your hard drive is. When using an Apple Mac, you can do this by clicking on the the drive icon on your desktop, then clicking on the File menu and then clicking on “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the capacity of the drive.
When using Windows, you double-click the My Computer icon and click once on the hard drive. It will generally say how big the drive is on the left-hand side of the window.
If reading directions doesn’t work as well as seeing how it works, I suggest Windows how to or Apple how to training, but specifically video lessons so you can watch the steps and learn.
Once you’ve seen 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 getting the drive ready to be used. Beforehand, the drive can be thought of a house pad before the construction of the house.
You can’t live a house pad because there aren’t any walls and no roof. So that’s what you do when you setup a hard disk. You “partition” and format it. You may have heard the word partition as a screen which divides one section of a room from another. A partition is basically the same thing.
When a person partition and format a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term works for you, you’re basically building the walls. You start off with the house pad, and then you put up the walls and the roof and you make it ready for use. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.
For the same reason, if you have a hard drive that isn’t erased, you can’t store anything onto it because it doesn’t have any walls or a roof.
So if you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, setting it up to be used, as being like putting a house on of a house pad, you might already have an idea why a hard drive’s size seems like space is missing.
It’s almost like you’ve lost space when you format it, when compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or the PC that came with that drive installed in it. It’ll say a bigger number than you seem to have when you looking at the drive’s size once it’s been set up to be used on the computer.
So if you begin with a foundation that’s a thousand square feet, once you put up the walls, you no longer have a thousand square feet left, not in practical, usable space. You have some of this space taken up by the walls.
Essentially speaking, that’s what happens when you format a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, it loses some of that space. You’ll probably find it’s a easy way to think about it, and it helps people understand.
I hope that clarifies things. Many of my clients have asked me about it — this is how I explain it to them, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope it makes sense for you, too.
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