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why hard disk

This article will give you an easy to understand explanation of an idea which is confusing to people a lot. First, I'll explain a pair of simple computer terms it'll be helpful for you to know.

We're going to also clarify why there seems to be a discrepancy between the size of a computer's hard drive when you buy it, or what's on the box it comes in, and how much its full size, when you’re there looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to be smaller.

First, let me define a couple of computer terms. These terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of these terms essentially are synonymous, therefore you're able to use them interchangeably.

A hard drive is the part inside the computer which really contains all of your data, your documents, pictures, music and the operating system of the PC itself, that could be Windows or OS X "Leopard" or anything else. Most times, everything that’s saved on a computer is going to be found on the hard disk.

Hard disks have been measured for many years 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 essentially the smallest unit of measurement for computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte).  A kilobyte is approximately 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is basically 1,000,000 bytes. A gigabyte is essentially 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is just about 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to get a long way beyond that but not for a few more years, so let's forget that .

For example, you have a computer that is a couple of years old. A person might have the idea you have a certain sized drive based on the label on the computer, or the specs on the receipt that you got when you got the machine.

So what if you want to find out the size of the drive. When using a Macintosh, you can do this by clicking on the the drive icon on your desktop, then clicking on the File menu and going to “Get Info.” That'll give you a window that lists the size of the drive.

On a Windows computer, you open the My Computer icon and click once on the hard drive. It'll usually say what the size of the drive is on the left-hand side of the window.

If you're not sure how this works, I suggest Windows Vista how to or Mac how to training, but specifically video lessons that show you the steps.

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

This is because of what happens when you prepare the drive for use. "Erasing" or "formatting" is the term for preparing the drive ready for use. Beforehand, the drive can be thought of a house pad before the house is built.

Obviously, you can't live in the foundation of a house because there are no walls and no roof. In other words what you do when you setup a hard disk. You "partition" and format it. Maybe you've heard the word partition as a screen that divides one area of a room from another. A partition is essentially the same thing.

When you partition and formart a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term works for you, what you're doing is basically raising the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you put up the walls and the roof and you get it all ready for use. Until you do that, a person can't live in it.

For much the same reason, if you have got a hard drive that isn't setup, you can’t store anything onto it because there are no walls or a roof.

If you think about erasing or formatting a drive, that is, getting it ready to be used, as being like putting a house on of a house pad, you might already begin to understand why a hard drive’s size seems like space is missing.

It’s almost like you’ve lost space when you format it, when compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or on the outside of the PC that came with that drive inside it. It will say a bigger size than you seem to have when you checking the drive's size after it’s been partitioned and formatted.

So if you start off with a house pad that is one thousand square feet, once you put up the walls, you don’t have all the full amount of square feet left any more, not in practical, floor space. You have some of the space taken up by the walls.

Essentially , that’s what happens when you format a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, it loses a little bit of that space. I think it’s a simple way to think of it, and it helps people understand.

I hope that clears up a little bit of a mystery. A lot of my clients have asked about it that's the way I explain it, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope that makes sense for you.