Hi Again: My new 1TB drive formatted to 938gb...Is it normal to lose that much space in a complete format of a new drive? Thanks,

Steve

Yup

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

It can be confusing, it is the conventions that the 2 parties (OS & HDD manufacturer's/developers) use almost interchangeably.

Your 1 TB HDD contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (or a 'tera' of bytes) whereas the computer - for reasons not worth going into counts in powers of 2, this is how RAM is addressed etc, which is essentially down to the way a processor 'counts'. This means that as far as a computer is concerned a Terabyte is 1024 Gigabytes or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

This gives you the disparity, big isn't it!?

Wait until you get a Petabyte of storage, the difference will keep getting larger, but neither is incorrect or false, just different.

Thanks for the explanation...Guess my 1TB drive is about right...Learn something new every day! Thanks again,

Steve

The "loss" has nothing to do with formatting.

See the following articles for an explanation.

Why does my hard drive report less capacity than indicated on the drive's label?
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... e=&strip=1

Storage Capacity Measurement Standards:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... en&strip=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

Thanks again...This is the first HD that I have worked with that wasn't factory installed in a system, so I have a lot to learn!

Steve

Totally not fair! Mine report 931gb... I want my 8gb back!

Do you mean 7GB?

Nah, I assumed it was more than 7.5GB, so I rounded up.