A portion of the space on a disk is taken up by the formatting information that marks sector headings, boundary definitions, timing information and other ‘overhead’.
For this reason, a disk's storage total depends on if you are looking at the formatted (the usable capacity of a disk drive) or unformatted capacity. It is normal for a disk to be sold quoting the unformatted capacity, one reason being that there are many different disk formats.
The larger the disk capacity the more you 'loose'.
Last edited by dlloyd : 26-10-2006 at 23:26