Where's My Space?!

Posted 07/22/2009 at 9:30pm | by The Maximum PC Staff

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I just bought a brand-new Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 and I cannot format the drive. I own a Dell XPS 630 with Windows Vista Home Edition and I bought the drive to use as a second hard drive to store photos and movies. When I installed the drive I saw that the BIOS was showing the full 1.5TB but when I went into Windows it was showing only 1.37TB. I tried to format the drive by going into Disk Management, but when it’s about half way into formatting the drive, it just freezes and stops working. Please HELP!

You’re not being ripped off; 1.37TB is the correct formatted capacity of a 1.5TB drive. The confusion comes from the fact that drive manufacturers list capacity in decimal numbers (1KB = 1,000 bytes), while information on computers is actually stored in binary, such that 1KB =1,024 bytes. You’re not losing any capacity, it’s counted differently. You have 1.5TB of space (1.5 x 10^12 bytes), or 1.37 tebibytes (binary terabyte; 1.5 x 240).

When we originally tested the 1.5TB Barracuda, we ran into the same formatting problems you’re seeing. It turns out there’s a bug in some older nForce drivers that prevents drives larger than 1TB from formatting. This affects the Nvidia 680i SLI chipset (which was on our motherboard) as well as the Nvidia 650i chipset in your Dell XPS system.
 
Download the latest nForce chipset driver version (15.25 at posting) from Nvidia.com and update your motherboard’s chipset and you’ll be able to format normally.

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