In this article you’ll get a simple explanation of an idea which is confusing to people pretty often. First, I will explain some easy computer terms that it will help for you to understand.that it’ll help for you to know.
We’re going to also explain why there is a discrepancy between the size of a hard disk when you order it, or what’s on the label on the drive, and how much its full size, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to not be as big.
First, allow me to define a couple of computer terms. The terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of the terms basically are synonymous, so it’s fine to use them interchangeably.
A hard drive is the part in a computer that in fact stores everything, your documents, pictures, music and the critical system files of the computer itself, that could be Windows XP or Mac OS 10.4 or anything else. Most times, everything that’s saved in a PC will be kept on the hard drive.
Hard drives have been measured for years in gigabytes and are now well on their way into the terabyte range, which is the next level after gigabytes.
A byte is essentially the smallest unit of measurement when you’re talking about computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte). A kilobyte is approximately 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is right around 1 million bytes. A gigabyte is basically 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is essentially 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to get far beyond that but not for a few more years, so forget about that for the time being.
For example, you have a computer which is a few years old. You might have the idea you have a certain amount of storage space on your hard drive based on the label on the drive, or the number on the sheet of paper that you got when you ordered the machine.
Let’s if you want to find out the size of the drive. If you’ve got one of Apple’s Mac computers, you can do this by clicking on the the drive icon, then clicking on the File menu and going to “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the capacity of the drive.
On a Windows computer, you open the My Computer icon and select the hard drive. It will usually say how big the drive is on the left side of the window.
If you want to see the steps, I suggest Windows Vista how to or Apple Mac how to training, but specifically video lessons so you can actually see the steps.
Once you know how big the drive is, it will turn out smaller than it seems like it should be.
This is because of what happens when you set up the drive for use. “Formatting” or “erasing” is the term for getting the drive ready to be used. Until this happens, the drive is kind of like the foundation of a house before you build the house.
You can’t live in the foundation of a house since there aren’t any walls or roof. In other words what happens when you format a hard drive. You “partition” and format it. You may have heard the word partition as one of those little dividers that divides one section of a room from another. A partition is essentially the same thing.
When you partition and formart a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term you prefer, what you’re doing is basically constructing the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you put up the walls and the roof and you get it ready for use. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.
For the same reason, if you have a hard drive that’s not formatted, you can’t store anything onto it because there are no walls or roof.
So if you think about erasing or formatting a drive, that is, setting it up for use, as being like building a house on top of a house pad, you might already have an idea why a hard drive’s size ends up seeming to be smaller.
It’s almost like you’ve lost space when you format it, when compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or the machine that came with that drive in it. You’ll find it says a larger number than you actually get when you looking at the drive’s size after it has been formatted.
If you start off with a house pad that’s 1,000 square feet, after the walls are there, you no longer have a thousand square feet left any more, not in actual, usable space. You have some of the space taken up by the walls.
Essentially , that’s what happens when you setup a drive. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, some space is lost. You may find it’s a pretty simple way to think about it, and it helps people understand.
I hope that makes sense. A lot of my clients have asked me about it — this is how I explain it to them, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope it makes some sense for you.