Maxtor or WD?

Keith G. Robertson-Turner fedora-gmane.00002 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk
Sat Jun 17 06:15:33 UTC 2006


Dotan Cohen wrote:

> One good thing that I can say about the Maxtor drive is that 160 GB
> turned out to be a little over 163 usable gigabytes. The 160 GB WD
> unit has about 152 usable gigabytes of storage.

Well that pretty much confirms it was a drive geometry error.

Formatted (usable) drive space is (without exception) *never* *more* 
than the quoted capacity ... *ever*. Apart from the fact that 
manufactures always use the decimal 1000x rather than 1024x figures for 
quoted capacities, which makes them look (in the advertising) bigger 
than they actually are, once the drive has a disklabel and filesystem on 
it, the capacity is reduced even further by the overhead.

So the fact that the partitioning software (fdisk or whatever) was 
reporting a larger available capacity than the quoted capacity, means 
AFAIAC that the geometry was being reported incorrectly. Maybe the drive 
doesn't properly support LBA (which would be unusual nowadays), maybe 
the mobo BIOS had the CHS value set manually (you should check that it's 
on "auto"), who knows. I know that figure *has* to be wrong though.

-
K.




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