HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows?

Posted by Chris Hoffman on How to geek See other posts from How to geek or by Chris Hoffman
Published on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:00:46 GMT Indexed on 2012/08/30 15:41 UTC
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If you’ve ever purchased a computer with a hard disk capacity of 500 GB and opened Windows Explorer only to find that its capacity looked more like 440 GB, you may be wondering where all those gigabytes went.

There are several reasons Windows could display the wrong amount of available space, from invisible shadow files, formatting overhead, and hidden recovery partitions to misleading (though technically accurate) storage capacities advertised by hard drive manufacturers.

Image Credit: Norlando Pobre

HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows?

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