New Hard Drive

Just put a new WD 2 TB hard drive in my Toshiba lap top. In the computer it is registering as 1.81 TB, why is that? PJ

The HD has "reserved space" for system files, hardware configuration, mapping, directory and file indexes, etc. So your computer is probably reporting the new drive's "usable space".

Just my two shekels.
Tom M.

NutmegCT said:

The HD has "reserved space" for system files, hardware configuration, mapping, directory and file indexes, etc. So your computer is probably reporting the new drive's "usable space".

Just my two shekels.
Tom M.

Click to expand...

Makes sense, thanks Tom

In addition to what Tom correctly said, WD drives are nototious for including lots of their own "smart ware," encryption programs, etc., which also takes up some space.

With 1.81 tb of usable space I don't think I'll ever fill it, but at least I won't have to worry about it overflowing!
It will be partitioned for Windows and Linux op systems.

If you use it to store TV, movies, games and other large stuff, you'll be surprised how fast it can fill up. I used to think a couple TBs was big, not anymore. 720p and 1080P stuff can be a couple gig or more each.

PAUL161 said:

With 1.81 tb of usable space I don't think I'll ever fill it, ...

Click to expand...

The very first computer my wife and I bought was an IBM PC clone made by Kaypro. It was a very rock solid PC with two floppy drives. After a year we upgraded the machine with a hard drive. We spent time discussing if we would EVER be able to fill the larger 30 MB drive.

The other issue is that there two different definitions of "terabyte". It can either be 10^12 (1,000,000,000,000); or 2^40 (1,099,511,627,776). Drive makers of course advertise their wares using the first definition; many computer systems (including Windows) use the second definition.

2TB by the first definition is 1.81 TB by the 2nd definition (if you truncate instead of round, again like Windows does).

PS, back when I started my first job as programmer, our 'big' development system (where we did all our editing and compiling) sported a whopping 5Mb hard drive. And we had to share it among 5 or 6 of us! Had 4 terminals, so several could edit at the same time; but only one build could run at a time. The build process would spit out almost a full roll of paper tape, which we then had to roll up and carry to the other room, to load onto a target machine.

Thanks Randall. I'd never known there were two definitions of terabyte.

Reminds me of the two definitions of "billion" (etc.), in long-scale and short-scale number systems.

In some countries/systems:

1,000,000 = one million
1,000,000,000 = one billion
1,000,000,000,000 = one trillion

In other countries/systems:
1,000,000 = one million
1,000,000,000 = thousand million, or "milliard"
1,000,000,000,000 = one billion

This always trips me up when balancing my check book.

:lol:

TR3driver said:

...when I started my first job as programmer, our 'big' development system (where we did all our editing and compiling) sported a whopping 5Mb hard drive.

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The first hard drive I ever saw was a whopping 10Mb Western Digital unit housed in a toaster sized plastic enclosure with a clear acrylic lid so you could watch it work. That drive was dedicated to an early industrial vision system. Unfortunately, the processors took way too long to evaluate the image so it was never more than a lab toy.

dklawson said:

The first hard drive I ever saw was a whopping 10Mb Western Digital unit housed in a toaster sized plastic enclosure with a clear acrylic lid so you could watch it work. That drive was dedicated to an early industrial vision system. Unfortunately, the processors took way too long to evaluate the image so it was never more than a lab toy.

Click to expand...

The first hard drive experience I had was working at the phone company early 1990's - we had DEC PDP-11 systems that TWO massive 200MB drive units. When I say massive I don't mean it stored a lot of data, I mean each unit was roughly the size of a top-loading washer and was operated in a very similar manner. The disk itself was a set of spaced glass 12 or 14 inch platters stored in what looked for all the world like an overly tall cake dome like you'd see in old-school diners.

You'd open the lid on the drive unit, lower the disk platter assembly (still inside its dome) into the cavity, turn the handle on top of the dome a full turn to lock the disk assembly to the drive spindle. That would also release the dome from the platter stack so you could lift it out and then close the lid (yes the chance of dust entering was high). Then you turned on the drive motor and held down the SPIN button until the platters were spinning up. It had dynamic balance weights that would unlock once it got to a certain RPM and it was cool to see the stack wobbling around as it spun suddenly snap to a perfectly centered and balanced rotation. Then and only then could you see the read-write heads come out from their protective slots and moving back and forth between the platters.

THEN you had to boot up the machine (about the size of 5 full size fridges side-by-side) which involved manually loading several binary instructions directly into CPU memory with rows of 24 paddle switches (one for each bit) one at a time. If you did it all correctly, the CPU would run those initial instructions which told it to read and execute the first block of data on the hard drive, which would then start the OS boot up sequence. I'm surprised there was not a rope with a wooden T handle somewhere along the way that you had to pull to start the thing.

It only used 1 hard disk at a time - there were 2 because if something happened to the first - you could put the backup disk (made nightly) into the other and get it up and running again in a matter of minutes. These machines did (among other things) the 911 lookups to provide an address to emergency services, downtime was NOT acceptable.

Speaking of hard drives - the 1956 IBM RAMAC's hard drive. Held a big ol' whopping 5 meg!


Platters the size of pizza pans. But it worked.

Just scored a 2T SSD for myself. Built a few clients' machines with 'em and decided my older CEntOS-5 box would benefit. This machine I'm on now runs CEntOS-7, still with "metal" drives, on an i7 engine, plenty quick for now. Amazing how far things have advanced.

Will this replace the drive in my Toshiba laptop? Also, can a SSD be partitioned the same as standard drive? And, I was told in the past that you don't try to defrag a SSD, true or false? PJ
View attachment 58451

I cannot answer the compatibility question.

I have been told the same as you that you should not frequently defrag a SSD. Others will know for sure but the explanation I was given was that each memory address on the SSD has a limited number of write cycles and that with a defrag you can use a whole bunch of those. Again, others will have to confirm and/or correct this explanation. Regardless, the SSD is so much faster than a traditional drive I doubt you would need to worry about files being fragmented.

Probably compatible, but you need to check your specific laptop to be sure. Here's what looks like a good article on the overall process, including what to check:
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/ssd-upgrade-tutorial

I'm not a big fan of WD; they used to be good but they've slipped a lot in recent years. They got into the SSD business by buying SanDisk, who also started out good and fell behind. So my suggestion (and what I did) was to go to these people instead:
https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/toshiba-memory
If you go through their selection process, they will guarantee their product will work in your laptop. They also have a good reputation for reliability.

SSDs do have a limited lifetime, and defragging burns it up. So it's best if you limit it to rare occasions, and even then, only process files that won't be changed soon and have a large number of fragments. As Doug said, fragmentation has much less effect with SSD, because they pay no penalty for non-sequential access. (Physical hard drives take time to move the heads, and then have to wait for the desired sector to come past the heads. SSDs don't have those delays.) Here's a good tool that lets you decide what to do, and when
https://www.ccleaner.com/defraggler

PAUL161 said:

Will this replace the drive in my Toshiba laptop? Also, can a SSD be partitioned the same as standard drive?

Click to expand...

It depends on your laptop's interface. The SSD in that photo will have a serial plug. Old laptops might have parallel plugs that would be incompatible. If your laptop is fairly new, it might take an M.2 drive. Those can be several times faster than the WD blue drive.

GregW said:

It depends on your laptop's interface. The SSD in that photo will have a serial plug. Old laptops might have parallel plugs that would be incompatible. If your laptop is fairly new, it might take an M.2 drive. Those can be several times faster than the WD blue drive.

Click to expand...

I believe M.2 drives have the wrong connections for this computer, mine has a space and connection for a 2.5 sata drive.
View attachment 58452

What is the best way to migrate Windows 7 pro to a new HD on a desktop. The C drive has a D partition.

David