What's up with the size of my new HDD?

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cep32

50 posts

Geek

#144250 12-May-2014 18:03

I have seen plenty of questions where people struggle with the idea of 1TB not being exactly 1000GB and the like but the problem I'm having seems a little beyond that.

This is what I see when I have a look at the disk management:

As you can see the capacity of Volume 2 is all over the place. 931GB is what I was expecting so it was a bit of surprise to see 723GB as well. I'm guessing it's a windows problem rather than a disk problem given the difference and the fact that windows 7 sees the full capacity in at least one location.

Any advice?

Cheers,

Chris

andrewNZ

2487 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#1042546 12-May-2014 18:13

I don't really know what's going on, but my money is on the fact that it's configured as a dynamic disk.

Ragnor

8223 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1042571 12-May-2014 18:47

The image is cut off what's to the right of the 1st partition on Disk 1, is there another partition or unallocated space?

Can you post the link to the full image? Go to https://www.geekzone.co.nz/gallery.asp and copy the "original size" link and paste it in your reply.

Alternatively, right click on the partition on Disk 1 and select "Properties", this should show you the partition size, perhaps the partition wasn't created to use the full capacity available.

Also no reason to use a dynamic disk over basic unless you intend to use windows software raid, you could you backup your data to somewhere else then delete the partition(s) on disk 1, convert to basic disk, then make a new partition using the full size available.

Inphinity

2780 posts

Uber Geek

#1042610 12-May-2014 19:56

Regardless, using it as a dynamic disk shouldn't reduce the usable size. I have a 1TB dynamic disk showing as 931.51GB, for example. Did you create & format the partition using disk manager, or some third party tools?

cep32

50 posts

Geek

#1042617 12-May-2014 20:14

Sorry for the cut off image. There is only the one partition so the image just continues to the right just the same as you can see. The disk was fomatted using the usual windows tools.

The one thing I had thought of was that it usd to be in an old XP machine and I just pulled it out of that and put it in the machine it is in now. Could that have messed with it?

Copying all of the data between this disk and an external via usb 3 so I can reformat sounds like a great way to waste a day. I need a second external backup anyway so it might be worth a try.

PhantomNVD

2619 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#1042644 12-May-2014 20:45

cep32:

Copying all of the data between this disk and an external via usb 3 so I can reformat sounds like a great way to waste a day. I need a second external backup anyway so it might be worth a try.

think you might be pleasantly surprised actually, my 2.5" USB3 external gets AWEsome speeds, and would prolly complete that 555GB backup in less than an hour easily?