Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests 5Gb 'secret' area in 80 Gig drives???

For most drive vendors 1M = 1000000 bytes. However, to everyone else in the computer world, 1M is 1048576 bytes and 1G is 1024 times that.

Take that value and multiply by 74 and you are very close to 80,000,000,000

So that's probably a good chunk of your missing 5gb.

There are all sorts of "lies" and "magic" on modern drives.

The whole notion of a fixed number of sectors/track, for instance. In reality, the geometry of a drive varies as you move from the outer edge of the platter towards the center.

However, modern, integrated controllers on the drive (where do you think the term IDE comes from?) hide the drives physical geometry and simply presents a logical uniform geometry that adds up to a capacity similar, but sometimes lower than the raw capacity of the drive.

IIRC, the term for that is Zone Bit Recording, or you might search for drive zoning to get a more detailed explaination.

FWIW,

TB