> My question is.......How come that a hard drive or partition > will bloat over time and if you try to add up the individual > contents it never comes up to the total being reported for > the drive?
It's about overhead. A drive or partition has a certain amount of space used by data, but it also needs space for the 'overhead' that is information about the file, etc. I have always thought that stating total drive space instead of usable space is a bit like when a cars engine horsepower is stated as the power created with nothing attached to the engine. But things like the alternator, fuel pump and water pump use horsepower that is NOT available for moving the car. Maybe that is why they switched to the Liter rating or something similar. There is also the old issue of million bytes vs Megabytes. Sometimes the mfg will state the drive size in terms of millions of bytes or trillions now. Look at it in the k-bytes values [since those are the numbers I have memorized.] ! kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not a thousand bytes. This results because computers use binary numbers. Decimal numbers given are expressions of some value of 2^nth power. Each time you ad a bit you increase the nth power. Decimal numbers used to express binary equivalents do not come out in even powers of ten. So they use terms like 'k' or 'M' when have different values in the non computer world. I think the problem in question is more related to the overhead than in the Meg vs Million, but the latter is confusing, especially with larger drives. Jim ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/67folB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> If you have any questions or problems with any aspect of this site, please feel free to contact me directly [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please do not post personal issues directly to the group. To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you for using A-1 Computer Tech Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/A-1-Computer_Tech/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
