Why is My Computer’s Hard Drive Smaller Than It’s Supposed to Be
In this lesson, I want to give you an easy to understand explanation of a computer concept which confuses people a lot. First, I will explain a pair of easy computer terms it’ll be helpful for you to understand.
I will also straighten out why there is a discrepancy between the size of your computer’s hard drive when you order it, or what it says on the box it comes in, and how much space is available on it, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to not be as big.
First, I’ll just define a couple of computer terms. The two terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of the terms essentially are synonyms — and it’s OK to use them interchangeably.
The hard drive is the part in the computer which actually stores all of your data, your documents, pictures, music and the OS of the computer itself, which might be Windows or OS X “Leopard” or anything else. Generally speaking, everything that’s stored on a PC is going to be located on the hard drive.
Hard drives have been measured for a while in gigabytes and are now well on their way into the terabyte range, which is a thousand times larger than a gigabyte.
A byte is basically the smallest unit of measurement when you’re talking about computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte). A kilobyte is approximately 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is approximately 1,000,000 bytes. A gigabyte is basically 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is just about 1 trillion bytes. It’ll go beyond that but not for a few years, so let’s forget that for the time being.
For example, you have a machine which is a couple of years old. You might have the idea you have a specific sized drive based on the label on the drive, or the specs on the receipt that you got when you bought the computer.
So say you want to find out how big the drive is. If you’re on a Mac, you can do this by clicking once on the the drive icon on your desktop, then go to the File menu and then clicking on “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the size of the drive.
On a Windows computer, you open the Computer icon and select the hard disc icon. It will generally say what the size of 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 XP how to or Mac how to, but specifically video lessons that show you the steps.
Once you know the size of the drive, 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 the term for getting the drive ready to be used. Beforehand, the drive is kind of like the foundation of a house or a house pad before construction starts on the house.
It’s not possible to live a house pad because there are no walls and no roof. In other words what happens when you setup a hard disk. You “partition” and format it. You may have heard the word partition as one of those little panels which separates 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, what you’re doing is essentially raising the walls. You start off with the house pad, and then you raise the walls and the roof and you prepare it for use. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.
For the same reason, if you have got a hard drive that’s not erased, you can’t store anything there because there are no walls or a roof.
If you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, getting it ready for use, as being like raising a house on 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, when 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 PC that came with that drive installed in it. It’ll say a larger size than you actually get when you’re checking the drive’s size once it’s been partitioned and formatted.
If you begin with a foundation that is 1,000 square feet, after the walls are there, you no longer have a thousand square feet left, not in practical, floor space. You’ve got some of that space taken up by the walls.
Basically speaking, that’s what happens when you erase a drive. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, some space is lost. You’ll find it’s a pretty simple way to think about it, and it helps people understand.
I hope that clarifies things. A lot of my clients have asked about it — this is how I explain it, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope that makes sense to you, too.
