HI! Just bought a new 500 GB HDD, but only shows up as 465 GB. Is there a way of maximizing the space? 35 GB lost is still quite a lot of space. After formatting the HDD, are there any files which can be deleted?

Cheers!

That's the drive overhead. A lot of information is written when formatting to generate the directory structures, sector address information, bad block information etc. and is normal. There are no "files" after formatting so nothing to recover. If you want more effective space out of the drive you can enable compression on it, but this will cause a slight performance hit.

HI! Just bought a new 500 GB HDD, but only shows up as 465 GB. Is there a way of maximizing the space? 35 GB lost is still quite a lot of space. After formatting the HDD, are there any files which can be deleted?

Cheers!

OS? File system? Partition type? Cluster size?

HI! Just bought a new 500 GB HDD, but only shows up as 465 GB. Is there a way of maximizing the space? 35 GB lost is still quite a lot of space. After formatting the HDD, are there any files which can be deleted?

Cheers!

There's no lost space, it comes down to two definitions of gigabyte. Sometimes it is considered to be 1024³ and sometimes it is considered to be 1000³. This page HERE explains why the size reported by the OS is not the same as the box.

Thanks all for your replies.

500,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024=465.661287307739

(and I didn't look at the link from Veazer )