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Re: Disk Space Calculation - Some Space missing - Where did it Go?



On 4/7/07, Greg Folkert <greg@gregfolkert.net> wrote:
On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 13:40 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 11:26:46PM +0530, Siju George wrote:
> >
> > So where did 27 ( 500 -473 ) GB go?
> >
> > Is there any error in my Calculations?
>
> disk drive manufacturers label their disks based on a 1 GB = 1000 MB =
> 1000 K, but the partition sizes are based on 1 GB = 1024 MB = 1024 K.
>
> that's how I understand it.

That is how the user is bamboozled. Even the drive itself says it right
on its label, after a few lawsuits.

I just happen to have 4 - 300GB disks in a single LVM volume group.

# vgdisplay voidVG
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               voidVG
  Format                lvm2
[snip]
  VG Size               1.09 TB
  PE Size               32.00 MB
  Total PE              35772

Each one of those drives is a "300GB" drive. But yet, I only get 1.09TB
out of the 4 drives.

Now, lets try the math to explain this. We should have 1200G or 1.2T.
But wait we actually do.

Figure it this way:

         35775 (number of Physical Extents)
        x   32 MB Physical Extent size
        x 1024 KBytes per MByte
        x 1024 Bytes per KByte
        -----------------------------------
        1,200,409,804,800 Bytes

Are we clear yet? See it *DOES* == 1.2T (base10)
--

Thankyou so much Andrew and Greg for your Clarifications :-)
I knew that the manufacturers used base 10 for calculations but I
thought at least fdisk would give me the right no. :-(
especially after seeing that 500.1 GB on the first line
But if you divide the Bytes (500106813440 bytes) 3 times with 1024 you
get only 465 GB :-)

=========================================================
websrv-1:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500106813440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
==========================================================

Thank you so much

Kind Regards

Siju



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