not able to use full disc space

[zaroba]

i've seen my fair share of these types of topics myself, but i don't think i've seen any with this exact problem.
its usually windows or bios that doesn't see a full drive and thus doesn't allow a full partition. in my case, both see the full drive.

i got six 2tb sata hard drives for my media pc.
installed 5 and copied all the data to them from the old hard drives (3x 1tb, 2x 750gb). 6th one isn't in yet simply because i misplaced my extra screws.

anyway, i'm finishing up reorganizing stuff on the new drives and just noticed how incorrect the capacities on the drives are.
it seems the sizes being displayed for them are assuming they are 1tb drives. for example,
selecting everything one of the drives (1,166 files in 1 folder) reports 900gb in 1166 files. but the drive itself reports 1.69tb used with 123gb free
a different drive has 405gb in 508 files, yet the drive only says 618gb free of 1.81tb
these capacities are seen both on the pc, and when looking at the drives over the network.

the bios reports the full drive size, windows itself is showing the drives as having a capacity of 1.81tb, drive management reports that the partitions are 1.81tb and the pc is using 64bit windows xp. the drives were all slow formatted and formatted using ntfs. all the 2tb drives have this problem, the 4 connected to the motherboard and the 1 attached to an sata expansion card.

somewhere, somehow, about 750gb are lost from each drive, they are being limited to 1024gb for what seems like no reason to me

 

[Cromewell]

Selecting all the files on the root and looking at how much space is being used doesn't work. The usage reported in disk properties is correct.

There are lots of tools here that will show you what folders are using the space.

 

[zaroba]

sorry, but i don't quite understand how that is possible.

i copied 690gb from a 750gb drive to a newly formatted and empty 1.81tb drive, how is it taking up 1.47tb on the new drive?
i copied 405gb from a 1tb drive to a newly formatted and empty 1.81tb drive, how is it taking up 1.19tb on the new drive?
i copied 900gb from a 1tb drive to a newly formatted and empty 1.81tb drive, how is it taking up 1.68tb on the new drive?

all three of the above drives only has 1 single folder containing all the files in it, no subfolders, no files outside of that one folder.
plus, the size of that folder + the reported free space equals exactly 1023gb on all three of those drives.

 

[zaroba]

here's a picture of the first drive in my previous post using Drive Analyzer:

1 folder containing 100% of the 922 files on the drive totaling 693.4gb
yet drive has a capacity of 1.8tb with 333.1gb free

i just pulled one of the 2tb drives from the media pc and am going to put it in this pc.
really, the only thing i can think of is a motherboard issue.

 

[zaroba]

took one of the drives and put it in this pc.

drive anylizer claims only has 346gb on it, yet windows says only has 314gb free
here's the odd thing, i know for a fact that i copied more then 346gb to the drive.
there's 2 main folders on the root of the drive.
show properties on one folder says 346gb.
but the other folder, which should have over 400gb in it, says 0 bytes and trying to access the folder gives an i/o error.

brand new sata drive. i can't imagine that theirs a good chance of getting 5 (maybe 6?) faulty drives at once. still gotta wonder if its an issue of newer drives not being fully compatible with older motherboards. the motherboard on this pc is 4 years old, the media pc has an equally old motherboard.

 

[zaroba]

put in the blank drive, and even it was saying there was 838gb used even though i hadn't copied anything to it after formatting it.

updated the chipset drivers in the media pc and did a quick format on the empty drive, it now shows the full 1.81tb as being available.
so guessing it was just the outdated chipset drivers.

now its just a matter of figuring out what might have been lost from attempting to copy stuff to the drives.
luckily i had kept all the data on the old drives.

 

[linkin]

Drive makers don't use correct sizes. they see a gigabyte as 1000MB, yet it is really 1024MB. So your 2TB drive will be 2000GB, not 2048GB. Boils down to the bits and bytes thing again.

Your ISP will also see a gigabyte as 1000MB, except that windows and all operating systems use correct sizes. You'd think in this day and age they'd correct it, as it is a standard in computing, but they make more money for less service this way

 

[zaroba]

Drive makers don't use correct sizes. they see a gigabyte as 1000MB, yet it is really 1024MB. So your 2TB drive will be 2000GB, not 2048GB

i know. hence why i was saying their full capacity was 1.81gb

i wasn't complaining about the less in space due to seller/user binary/decimal system differences.
the issue was that there seemed to be a missing 800gb+ from the drives 1.81gb formatted capacity.
problem seems to have been solved by updating the motherboards chipset drivers