Is this normal?? Can't believe this

I bought a 250 GB external USB hdd and after I formatted it to ntfs it says the capacity is 233 GB now. What the ....? What is on the 17 GB that I can't access on this brand new backup hdd right out of the box?

 

right-click on the drive in My Computer and look at the properties for th exact values.

 

the HDD is GB
the OS is GiB

not the same thing,

the only real "missing" space is a very small amount of filesystem overhead
(varies with the file system but generally proportional more or less)
and is totally unavoidable

the difference between the two measuement systems was minimal when it all started and is ever increasing as capacities grow.

Binary vs. Decimal Measurements

http://i10.tinypic.com/29axxzp.jpg


in the past people have pointed the finger at HDD manufacturers, but its an industry standard to measure in GB (MB) and an OS standard to measure in GiB but list it as GB
so my personal opinion is to complain about the OS "misinformation"

 

Have a 120 GB internal slave hdd that only shows up as 111 GB in Windows. Drove me nuts until I tracked down exactly what Ice_Czar stated. If I understand correctly though the entire drive can\will be used. It just will show the size differently.

 

The values that matter are those displayed in the drives properties.

 

Capacity: shows as 120,031,477,760 bytes 111 GB

 

still measured as GiB and incorrectly reported as GB
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

however some companies have chosen to ignore this simple and necessary change in notation that would once and for all eliminate these constant and never ending threads of where the hell did all my space go!

SI prefix has always been DECIMAL
applying it to Binary was not of much consequence to the end user till the capacity explosion in HDDs pointed up this problem, now its bad and going to get worse if they dont start to adopt the proper notation in the damn OS! This isnt rocket science its just a few damn i's

http://i11.tinypic.com/29mxhg3.jpg

then folks would say HEY whats the difference?
and l o o k i t u p
right now they start out with feeling ripped off not suspecting their OS is lying to them
but a few little i's and theyd at least have a clue that there is something a little different here.

You dont feel ripped off if you buy 5 pounds of potatos only to find youve been given 2.26796185 kilograms of em.

 

THe "byte" values reported in Properties are correct.
THe other values do not matter and are neve rused within software, just eye candy.

 

THe "byte" values reported in Properties are correct.
But they do not matter and are never processed by users.

its like asking someone you pick out of a crowd to comprehend 127 to a power of 12
in the dim recesses of their mind they recall a 3rd grade math class and come to the conclusion its "a lot" but it has no useful reference to anything they can put into a scale \ context
we dont measure the distance between towns in inches,
we'd would loose the context of scale

its a property page for users, not the computer
the computer already knows how many bytes there are