Maxtor or WD?

[Dotan Cohen]

On 17/06/06, Keith G. Robertson-Turner
<fedora-gmane.00002 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.
>

Sounds logical. That was the capacity reported on the Fedora install
CD when I got to partitioning, and I think Ubuntu as well.

Dotan Cohen
http://what-is-what.com
03