Planet Earth Central

This article will give you a regular language explanation of an idea that’s confusing to people pretty often. First, we’re going to define two computer jargon & terms it’ll be helpful for you to understand.

We’re going to also clarify why there is a discrepancy between the size of a hard disk when you get it, or what is on the label on the drive, and how much space is available on it, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to not be as big.

So, allow me to define a couple of computer terms. These two terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of the terms basically mean the same thing, and it’s OK to use them interchangeably.

The hard disk drive is the part in the computer that really holds all the information, your documents, pictures, music and the OS of your PC itself, which might be Windows or Mac OS 10.4 or anything else. Usually, everything that’s saved in a computer is going to be found on the hard drive.

Hard drives have been measured for quite some time in gigabytes and are now well on their way into the terabyte range, which is one order of magnitude up from a gigabyte.

A byte is pretty much the smallest unit of measurement with computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte).  A kilobyte is approximately one thousand bytes. A megabyte is approximately 1,000,000 bytes. A gigabyte is basically 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is essentially 1 trillion bytes. It’ll go a long way past that but not for a while yet, so forget about that .

You might have a computer which is years old. You might think you have a specific amount of storage space on your hard drive based on the label on the computer, or the specifications on the sheet of paper that you got when you got the computer.

So what if you want to find out how big your hard drive is. When using a Mac, you can do this by clicking on the the drive icon, then clicking on the File menu and then go to “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the capacity of the drive.

If you’re on a Windows computer, you open the My Computer icon and click on the drive once. It’ll usually say what the size of the drive is on the left side of the window.

If you want to see the steps, I suggest Windows computer how to training or Mac OSX how to training, but specifically video lessons that show you the steps.

Once you’ve seen how big the drive is, it’s going to show up as less than what you think.

This is because of what happens when the drive is first set up for use. “Erasing” or “formatting” is the term for preparing the drive ready for use. Beforehand, the drive is kind of like a house pad before the house is built.

You can’t live a house pad since there aren’t any walls or a roof. So in other words, that’s what you do when you setup a hard drive. You “partition” and format it. Maybe you’ve heard the word partition as a panel which separates one section of a room from another. A partition is fundamentally the same thing.

When you partition and formart a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term works for you, you’re essentially building the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you build the walls and the roof and you prepare it for use. Until you do that, no one can live in it.

For the same reason, if you have got a hard drive that isn’t partitioned and formatted, you can’t put anything onto it because there are no walls or roof.

If you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, preparing it for use, as being like raising a house on top of a foundation, you might already begin to understand why a hard drive’s size seems smaller than it should be.

It’s almost as if you’ve lost space when you format it, at least when you compare to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or the PC that came with that drive installed in it. You’ll find it says a bigger number than you actually get when you checking the drive’s size once it has been formatted.

If you begin with a foundation that is 1,000 square feet, after the walls are up, you no longer have a thousand square feet left any more, not in real, floor space. You have some of this space taken up by the walls.

Essentially speaking, that’s what happens when you partition and format a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, it loses some of that space. You’ll probably find it’s a pretty easy way to think about it, and it helps people understand.

Hopefully that clears up a little bit of a mystery. Many of my clients have asked me about it that’s the way I explain it, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope it makes some sense for you.