Drive size

[eldano]

Here is some Newbie-ness for you;

I installed a 2TB hard drive on my hda. It works fine, but it shows up as a 1,8TB partidtion in the dashboard.
I know that in practice the drives are smaller than advertised, but I think 200GB or 10% less is quite a lot. Is that normal?
I partitioned the drive as ext4 instead of ext3, can that also be why?

[moredruid]

The difference is explained mostly due to the diffence between Terabyte (TB, 10^12, or 1.000.000.000.000 bytes) and Tebibytes (TiB 2^40, or 1 099 511 627 776 bytes) and yes that could very well approximate 10%. OSes usually report the binary notation, hardware manufacturers the decimal notation. The binary notation is usually associated with computers: e.g. 2GB memory is actually 2GiB memory or 2048 MiB. As far as I know HDDs are the only components that really use the decimal notation.

Some more info on that on Wikipedia.

That said, filesystems do take up a certain amount of space for themselves, but this is negligable (think of maybe 128MB on a 2TB filesystem depending on the layout).

[eldano]

Okay, good to know that.
Thanks!