Losing 10 gb of free space on a new formatted drive

[Sleepgolfer]

Why does mft take up 10 Gb of my new 120 Gb drive?

[simpletim]

what is mft? If you are losing space, one of the first places to look on a large hard drive is at the recycle bin. right click and change how much it holds from a percent to a fixed size. it normally will take up about 10% of the size of your hard drive, or about 12 gigs. hope this helps

[mn]

Hardware manufacturers generally use a different scale when talking about capacity. For example, they'll consider 1,000,000 bytes a MB whereas software uses the (correct) 1024x1024 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes.

Once you actually format a huge drive the difference can be substantial. For example a new 180GB drive formatted with NTFS is around 167GB of space.

Perhaps this accounts for what you are seeing?

Regards,
Mike

[kp]

MFT = NTFS equivalent of FAT's File Allocation Table (and then some). It is roughly proportional to the size of the drive, but 10GB seems huge. Where are you getting that value from?

[Sleepgolfer]

I've formatted it with disk management in administrative tools. It shows 111 Gb of capacity anywhere in windows where I can check the size of the drive...

[Durk]

Nothing to worry about; my 160 GB disk shows 152 GB in disk management. It's just what mn says. Go ahead and be happy.

About MBs, MiBs, etc., see:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

[DevonB]

Ya, the 'numbers' game should take about 6 gigabytes off your total there. Always take your size and divide by 1024 two times to get your megabytes.

Devon