Hi I have looked through the posts and dont see anyone else with my particular situation so here is my question

December last year I bought a brand new seagate barracuda 7200.9 300 Gig sata hard drive which I use as my second or storage drive. My main drive is a maxtor 160 gig sata drive. I long formatted the seagate drive with XP Home and noticed it only gave me 279 gigs of usable space, I have formatted the drive twice more since then and everytime same 279 gigs available. Where is the other 21 Gigs and is there away to reclaim this space

(My main Drive formats to 152 Gig)

My system specs are

CPU 3.2 Intel HT
Motherboard Intel desktop board D865GBF
GPU Bioforce Nvidia 6800XT 512MB DDR2 128 BIT
HardDrive Maxtor 160 Gig SATA (main drive)
Seagate barracuda 7200.9 300 Gig SATA (2nd drive)
RAM 4 x 512 DDR (Hynix)
OS Windows XP Home SP 2 (OEM)

thanks a mill

prodigal son

Please download JAM Software - TreeSize Professional - Hard Disk Space Manager ... which gives you an idea what has happened to your space.

Everything is as it should be. The hard drive manufacturers measure hard drive space differently than the rest of the world. What they say is 300GB everyone else considers 279GB. It goes like this: 80 GB/74 GB, 160 GB/149 GB, 200 GB/186 GB, 250 GB/232 GB, 300 GB/279 GB, 320 GB/298 GB, 400 GB/372 GB, 500 GB /465 GB and 750 GB/698 GB

Thanks a mill for answering so quick guys, its good to know all is as it should be
Still feel a little robbed though

Don't feel robbed. You got the 300,000,000,000 bytes of storage that you paid for (possibly a slight bit more). Microsoft divides this by 1,073,741,824 bytes (their gigabyte which is 2^30 or 2 to the 30th power). That gives approximately 279.4 of Microsoft's gigabytes.

Just remember, the manufacturer "robs" you of about 70.3MB per gigabyte.

Nobody gets robbed, as explained...it's the way it is counted. It's just one of those things that you acknowledge and move on.

I still think it's like me saying to you "I'm giving you one dollar," and then handing you 71 cents.

Technically it is Windows which is lying, not the manufacturers. The 300 GB hard drive is 300 GB but 279 GiB.