Date: 29 Dec 2005 14:20:43 -0500 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> To: Travis Poppe <tlp@liquidx.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Harddrive size being reported incorrectly? Message-ID: <444q4ryak4.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <200512291202.51955.tlp@liquidx.org> References: <200512291202.51955.tlp@liquidx.org>
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Travis Poppe <tlp@liquidx.org> writes: > Hello, > > I've recently purchased an IDE 320GB Western Digital WD3200JB-22KFA0 > harddrive for use in my FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE fileserver. The BIOS in the system > reports the drive as being a 320GB, but FreeBSD (dmesg) sees it as a 305245MB > (or 298GB drive) in two separate machines. When it has finally been formatted > for use, I get 289GB of available space. > > Now, I understand that harddrive manufacturers measure things differently > (1000kbytes per gbyte rather than 1024, or something like that) than > expected, but I've been told by a few people that I should be getting around > 305-312GB of available space after the drive has been formatted. Well, no. 305245MB is (305245x1024x1024), or just a *hair* larger than 320 x 10e10 bytes. So what FreeBSD reports is exactly what you should expect from the manufacturer's specification. > sysinstall had to adjust the drive geometry because the reported one was > 'invalid'. I tried to manually specify the geometry BIOS reported, but this > too was rejected as invalid. > > BIOS Geometry-CYL/HD/SECT: 65535/16/255 C/H/S geometries are (more or less) fictitious these days anyway. I let the installer do what it wants, and haven't had a problem in a long time. > Am I really getting the full potential out of this drive, or is something > wrong? Looks like things are working fine.
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