hi all, i just replaced an older western digital 40 gig in my usb enclosure with a seagate ST316002 1A 160 gig hard drive. 

i powered it up and partitioned with partionmagic8 and the final result is just a 137gig hard drive.  my calc/expectations was at least 147. any ideas on what happened to the other 10 or so?  thanks!!!
jigs

Do a search on google for 137GB.  This might be a Windows limitation (depending on your version) and may also be a hardware limitation of your drive enclosure.

You’re calculating the difference between the HD makers definition of “gigabyte” (1,000,000,000 bytes) and the standard computer science definition of gigabyte (1,073,741,824). You’re forgetting that you’ve got to format the disk. That extra space you’re missing is stuff like the NTFS MFT and logs.

You’re also losing average of about half your block size per file too.

I think it may be a BIOS limitation of your device. There’s a magic 137GB barrier in older products.

[Edit] dang you all and your fast responses…

Thanks all for the swift response!  u are all amazing! but ...
Whoops my original post was wrong and I only got 131 usable Gigs from the 160 gb drive! That’s nuts. Groove, what do u mean by older device? Is the problem in the tr3 bios? the drive is the latest model from seagate.  But i am so happy to have the exra space i almost dont care at this point. it seems like such a waste however, almost 30 gigs gone… is there a fix?
thanks
jigs
ps. i tried using the util from seagate (drivemagic) but it reports the same possible space…

drive report from partition magic:

Volume           Errors PartType       Status     Size (MB)    PartSect   #    Start Sector Total Sectors
                  0   Unallocated     Pri           7.8       None   —-        63       16,002
                  0   ExtendedX       Pri       131061.5           0   0       16,065   268,414,020
                  0   EPBR         Log       131061.5       None   —-      16,065   268,414,020
G:                0   NTFS         Log       131061.5       16,065   0       16,128   268,413,957

ALSO, i have another external HD - an ION drive 160 gig that formated out at 152 gigs, so the problem must be in the enclosure that i am using yes?  it’s an older enclosure made by Que. arg. maybe i just need a better enclosure…but the cost of one of those outweights the cost of the 30 gigs….

Now that I do the math, you’re right, that is a bit much. That’s about 82% usable vs list. On my drives at home (a 500GB RAID 1 and a 250 GB backup) I’m getting about 93% usable vs what’s listed on the box. My 500 GB drive gets reported as 467GB, so it’s all a matter of scale as to what 30GB means to you. :D Forget my answer above…

48-bit LBA support was added in XP SP1, so your software should be, in theory, OK. I’d try to find a firmware update for your enclosure.

thanks for the math drachen!  :o i think it is the enclosure firmware that’s the problem now, but the qps-inc site (which seems like it was taken over by another company (dps) has no downloadable files for the drive or the enclosure.  So i guess i will just have to thank my lucky stars that i have 130gigs. i really like the compact style of the enclosure - it matches my tr3 setup…

This might be a longshot, but it worked for me:
I had the same problem with an external drive. But instead of using 3rd party software to format it, I simply did it through the Windows Administrative Tools. Once in there, select Computer Management, then in there select Disk Management. The rest will be obvious to you. Worth a try, anyhow…

[quote author=“babahi”]This might be a longshot, but it worked for me:
I had the same problem with an external drive. But instead of using 3rd party software to format it, I simply did it through the Windows Administrative Tools. Once in there, select Computer Management, then in there select Disk Management. The rest will be obvious to you. Worth a try, anyhow…

babahi, thanks but same thing there. it must be the enclosure and i doubt i will ever find the firmware for this (if it even exists). so consider this case closed and a lesson learned…
jigs