Hi Team,

I have installed a new hard disk to my pc branded Seagates . The HD is 500GB. But while formatting it for the first time the total unpartitioned space is shown as 476938 MB. Still I have formatted it with the available space. I want to know why there is short of space for 35062 MB. Also when a HD is formatted we find a shortage of disk space. Why does this happen and can we recover the lost disk space. Any tips to maintain the hard disk is appreciated. Pls help me.


Thank you.

Think of your new hard drive as a big new giant field that you want to turn into a parking lot. If you put the cars bumper to bumper, it would hold 500 cars. But you need to organize this field into a parking lot so you paint lines for parking spots and rows to get into and out of them. And finally you need an office to manage it all so no cars get lost, or free spaces go unused. Your lines, rows, and office take up 30 spots. Now you can only put 470 cars in your 500 car lot.

Same with a hard disk. The maker measures an empty disk. Formatting lays down the tracks and sectors, preparing the disk to store data. And as file system is set up to keep it all organized. All that overhead takes space so you lose some.