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I have a 500 GB HDD in my laptop, but when I add up the partitions, they take up 465GB, and there are no unallocated spaces anywhere. Where did that 35GB go?

This is what my HDD looks like in the Windows partition manager:

enter image description here

As you can see, the space used is 0.6 + 0.3 + 409.19 + 37.25 + 2.79 + 15.53 = 465.66GB. On the left, Windows does indeed report the size of the drive as being 465 GB, but I know for a fact that this is a 500GB HDD, unless Newegg, Ebay and Amazon all made mistakes. Can someone please help me get back the 35GB I'm entitled to?

Note: I do know that the HDD has 7 partitions, even if only 6 are shown. The one that you can't see is Microsoft Reserved, and is very small, so that's not what is missing.

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    1) Who told you it was 500GB? (Most things get rounded up. a 460GB disk will be sold as 500GB.). 2) Did you correct for GiB vs GB?
    – Hennes
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:23
  • For a better understanding of GiB and GB: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17933
    – Max
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:24
  • Newegg lists it as 500GB, as well as Amazon.
    – superchampionoftheworld
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:26
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    Here's something interesting. 500GB is exactly 465.66GiB. Wow. I probably would have checked for this, if the partition manager said GiB instead of GB. Thanks for the help.
    – superchampionoftheworld
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:29
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    Windows uses base 10 to report the size of a HDD. Additionally there is overhead for your file system. Additionally HDD manufactures (check the HDD box as proof) advertise GB in a different way then Windows calculates them. In other words 465.64 GB is 100% of your HDD disk space.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:30

1 Answer 1

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Detail

Looks like your hard drive is actually 500 000 000 000 bytes. This is very common with hard drives capacity.

This does not equal 500 GiB since in computing one KiB is 1024 bytes (not 1000 as in real life). Hence this equals to 500 000 000 000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 465 GiB.

Even when you see GB, MB or KB in computer software, those are actually GiB, MiB and KiB most of the time because this is the way a computer counts. Windows should have printed 465 GiB to be accurate.

Hard drives capacity is often announced in 1000-based units which makes it appears greater, because 500 GB looks great even if it is smaller than 500 GiB.

Sump up

Your hard drive is both 500 GB (pure human counting) and 465 GiB (computer counting).

Few more fingers

  • 1000-based values as used by hard drive manufacturers:

    • 1 KB = 1 000 bytes
    • 1 MB = 1 000 000 bytes
    • 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 bytes
    • 500 GB = 500 * 1GB = 500 000 000 000 bytes

  • 1024-based values as used by computers:

    • 1 KiB = 1024 bytes
    • 1 MiB = 1024 Kib = 1 048 576 bytes
    • 1 GiB = 1024 MiB = 1 073 741 824 bytes
    • 500 GiB = 500 * 1 GiB = 500 * 1024 MiB = 536 870 912 000 bytes

Windows file property

You can also see this weirdness when you open any file property dialog under Windows. It will show you something like "48 KB (49,152 bytes)".

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  • Yep, I figured this out. Windows reports it as 465GB, which is why I got confused. However, Linux shows it as 465GiB, which is correct.
    – superchampionoftheworld
    Commented Aug 27, 2017 at 14:33

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