# 2TB WD hard drive missing space



## thevil1

I recently bought on sale a WD elements 2TB external hard drive. 
When I plugged it in, it only shows 1.81TB. I'm used to some space loss due to formatting and autorun programs, but almost 400 GB? Is that normal?
The box says that "total accessible capacity varies on operating environments". I'm running XP on an HP PC. Any clues?


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## PohTayToez

Taken from: http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm



> *Introduction*
> 
> At some point in time, most users have  come across a situation where a drive or disk being used run out of  space even though there is thought to be plenty of space. A lot of  times, this is the rude awakening for the consumer that the device they  are attempting to store data on is not as large as it was advertised. In  this article, we take a look at how manufacturers rate the capacity of  storage devices such as hard drives, floppies, flash media and compact  disks and their actual size.
> *Bits, Bytes and Prefixes.*
> All  computer data is stored in a binary format as either a one or zero.  Eight of these bits together for the most commonly referred to item in  computing, the byte. The various amounts of storage capacity are  referred by a prefix to represent a specific amount, similar to the  metric prefixes. Since all computers are based on binary math, these  prefixes represent base 2 amounts. Each level is an increment of 2 to  the 10th power or 1,024. The common prefixes are as follows:
> 
> 
> Kilobyte  (KB) = 1,024 Bytes
> MegaByte (MB) = 1,024 Kilobytes or  1,048,576 Bytes
> Gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 Megabytes or  1,073,741,824 Bytes
> Terabyte (TB) = 1,024 Gigabytes or  1,099,511,627,776 Bytes
> This is very important information  because when a computer operating system or program reports the  available space on a drive, it is going to report the overall total of  available bytes or reference them by one of the prefixes. So, an OS  reporting a total space of 70.4 GB actually has around 75,591,424,409  Bytes of storage space.
> *Advertised vs. Actual*
> Since  consumers don't think in base 2 mathematics, manufacturers decided to  rate most drive capacities based on the standard base 10 numbers we are  all familiar with. Therefore, one Megabyte equals one million bytes  while one Gigabyte equals one billion bytes. This isn't too much of a  problem with fairly small numbers such as a Kilobyte, but each level of  increase in the prefix also increased the total discrepancy of the  actual space compared to the advertised space.
> Here is a quick  reference to show the amount that the actual values differ compared to  the advertised for each common referenced value:
> 
> 
> Megabyte  Difference = 48,576 Bytes
> Gigabyte Difference = 73,741,824  Bytes
> Terabyte Difference = 99,511,627,776 Bytes
> Based  on this, for each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are  over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly  70.3 MB of disk space. So, if a manufacturer advertises an 80 GB (80  billion bytes) hard drive, the actual disk space is around 74.5 GB of  space, roughly 7% less than what they advertise.
> Now, this isn't  true for all the drives and storage media on the market. This is where  consumers have to be careful. Most hard drives are reported based on the  advertised values where a Gigabyte is one billion bytes. On the other  hand, most flash media storage is based around the actual memory  amounts. So a 512MB memory card has exactly 512 MB of data capacity, but  this leads to the next area of reported space.
> *Formatted vs.  Unformatted*
> In order for any type of storage device to be  functional, there must be some method for the computer to know which  bits stored on it relate to the specific files. This is where formatting  of a drive comes in. The types of drive formats can vary depending on  the computer but some of the more common ones are FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS.  In each of these formatting schemes, a portion of the storage space is  allocated so that the data on the drive can be catalogued enabling the  computer or other device to properly read and write the data to the  drive.
> This means that when a drive is formatted, the functional  storage space of the drive will be less than its unformatted capacity.  The amount by which the space is reduced will vary depending upon the  type of formatting used for the drive and also the amount and size of  the various files on the system. Since it does vary, it is impossible  for the manufacturers to quote the formatted size. This problem is most  frequently encountered with flash media storage over larger capacity  hard drives.
> *Conclusions*
> Hopefully this look at how  both manufacturers and computer devices see storage devices has been  helpful to explain why the values will differ. It is important when  purchase a computer, hard drive or even flash memory to know how to read  the specifications properly. Typically manufacturers will have a  footnote in the device specifications to show how it is rated. This can  help the consumer to make a much more informed decision.


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## joh06937

7% doesn't show up on any drive. that is just how much you'll have.


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## S.T.A.R.S.

I hate WD hard disk drives!!!They suck!!!I am saying this because they suddenly stop working and you need to buy a new one and why I ESPECIALLY hate them is because they are so damn sensitive when the BOOT SECTOR comes in question.The BOOT SECTOR disappears on them so easily and you need to recover it so often. I had the WD HDD in my laptop and in just 2 months,the BOOT SECTOR disappeared 3 times!3 freaking times!!!After the third time I decided to replace that stinky WD HDD with the SAMSUNG HDD and now everything seems fine


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## mtb211

haha yeah man I always wondered where some gigs were going on my drives, I just realized all computers do this


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