Today I wanted to share with you a question sent in from a reader who asks; "I just bought a 160GB hard drive to replace my old 80GB drive. Installation went fine however, XP only recognizes 149.01GB what's the deal??

Well this question gets asked quite often and it brings with it a lot of arguments and confusion.

So what's the deal?

Well your hard drive is advertised as having a 160GB capacity, but your computer shows only 149.01.

This discrepancy is the result of having two methods of measuring capacity. Computers are binary, or "base two," mathematical systems, and in a binary world a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2 to the 10th power). When computers were new, the designers referred to this as a "kilo." The public, however, understood kilo to mean thousand, (decimal) and thought that 1000 bytes should equal a kilobyte.

So, two different measurements of hard drive space were born. In 1998, (IEC) weighed in, defining 1 "gigabyte" as 1 billion bytes. Hard disk manufacturers agree, marketing their products using the rounder decimal value instead of the binary system. So, your drive is labeled as decimal "giga" and your PC reads binary IEC's term, "gibi". (We wont get into those foolish names today.)

So essentially you are not being ripped off. The number of bytes on the hard drive is the same weather you use decimal or binary. Lets use a scenario often used to help better understand this conversion. This is similar to the difference between 0 degrees Celsius and 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It is the same temperature, but will be reported differently depending on the scale you are using. I hope I have cleared up any confusion you may have had regarding the "missing" space on your hard drive.

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