hard drive smaller
This article will give you an easy to grasp explanation of a computer concept which is confusing to people pretty frequently. First, we’re going to demystify two computer terms so you understand what you need to get the most out of this article.
I will also make clear why there is a difference between the size of a computer’s hard drive when you get it, or what it says 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 not be as big.
So, allow me to define those computer terms. These two terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of the terms essentially are synonyms — therefore it’s fine to use them interchangeably.
The hard disk drive is the part of the computer that in fact contains all the information, your documents, pictures, music and the operating system of your PC itself, which might be Windows Vista or Mac OS 10.4 or anything else. Most times, everything that’s saved on a computer is going to be kept on the hard drive.
Hard drives have been measured for years in gigabytes and are now moving into the terabyte range, which is a thousand times larger than a gigabyte.
A byte is basically the smallest unit of measurement with computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte). A kilobyte is around 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is basically 1 million bytes. A gigabyte is basically 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is just about 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to go well past there but not for a while yet, so forget about that for the time being.
Let’s say you have a computer which is years old. Someone might have the idea you have a specific amount of storage space on your hard drive based on the label on the drive, or the specifications on the receipt that you got when you got the machine.
So say you want to find out the size of the drive. When using an Apple Mac, you can do this by clicking once on the the drive icon on your desktop, then go to the File menu and then go to “Get Info.” That opens a window with the size of the hard drive..
When using Windows, you go into the My Computer icon and click once on the hard drive. It will generally tell you 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 7 how to or Mac OSX how to lessons, but specifically video lessons so you can watch the steps and learn.
Once you’ve seen the size of the drive, you’ll find it’s smaller than you think.
This is because of what happens when you set up the drive for use. “Erasing” or “formatting” is the term for getting the drive ready for use. Before this happens, the drive is sort of like a house pad before you build the house.
You can’t obviously live in the foundation of a house since there are no walls or roof. So in other words, that’s what you do when you format a hard drive. You “partition” and format it. You may have heard the word partition as a panel which separates one area of a room from another. A partition is fundamentally the same thing.
When you are partitioning and formatting a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term works for you, what you’re doing is essentially raising 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 got a hard drive that’s not erased, you can’t store anything on it because it doesn’t have any walls or roof.
So if you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, setting it up for use, as being like putting a house on top of a house pad, you might already begin to guess why a hard drive’s size ends up seeming to be smaller.
It’s almost like you’ve lost space when you format it, at least when you compare 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 in it. It will say a larger size than you seem to have when you’re looking at the drive’s size once it’s been set up to be used on the computer.
So if you start off with a foundation that’s one thousand square feet, once you put up the walls, you don’t have a thousand square feet left, not in practical, floor space. You have some of this space taken up by the walls.
Essentially , that’s what happens when you erase a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, some space is lost. You’ll probably find it’s a easy way to think about it, and it helps people understand.
Hopefully that clears up a little bit of a mystery. A lot 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 it makes sense for you, too.
