I just purchased a LaCie Big Disk 500 GB external harddrive and when I set it all up and connected it to my CPU it only contained 467GB worth of storage. Can anybody tell me why this is??

All computer hard drives do this. All of mine have done this. I believe the motherboard sets aside a certain amount of hard disk space for page file usage and other little thingies like some sort of formatting area that cannot be used. I may be wrong on the terminology but I know that your hard drive will, more than likey, never show the full amount of space. It's okay. Computers are designed that way.

All computer hard drives do this. All of mine have done this. I believe the motherboard sets aside a certain amount of hard disk space for page file usage and other little thingies like some sort of formatting area that cannot be used. I may be wrong on the terminology but I know that your hard drive will, more than likey, never show the full amount of space. It's okay. Computers are designed that way.

You also have take into account that manufacturers market these things by saying that since it has 500,000,000,000 bytes that it is 500 gigabytes when in actuallity 500,000,000,000 is divided by 1024 to get kb, 1024 again to get mb, 1024 again to get gb. This equals 465 gigabytes almost exactly what you are reporting.

Computers don't jump up to the next nomeclature until every 1024 units of the one preceding it - not a straight 1000 like you would suppose.

It really just comes down to marketing versus the way your computer actualy views it.

Fabulous! Thank you for that answer!

IBM started this odious marketing practice a decade ago.

Generally I would write off 10% of the drive's capacity. As Brandon pointed out, your OS and hard drive manufacturers use different numbering systems. After formatting you lose around 7%. You can't actually use all of the drive's capacity without running into fragmentation issues (which will cause speed issues).

Great, thanks for the answers peoples. Damn that false advertising!