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Hard drive lose capacity over time

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2012 11:10 pm
by Blood
Do hard drives lose capacity over time?

I recently reconfigured and reformatted a pair of samsung F3 1TB (which has always been in windows 7 software raid). However, when I tried to recreate the raid, I realized that one hard drive reports 931.39 capacity while the other reports 931.51.

Looking at S.M.A.R.T., the value for reallocated sector count is still at 200 and didn't drop a bit for either hard drive. Am I missing something? Why is this happening?

Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:13 am
by Fire-Flare
Blood wrote:Do hard drives lose capacity over time?

I recently reconfigured and reformatted a pair of samsung F3 1TB (which has always been in windows 7 software raid). However, when I tried to recreate the raid, I realized that one hard drive reports 931.39 capacity while the other reports 931.51.

Looking at S.M.A.R.T., the value for reallocated sector count is still at 200 and didn't drop a bit for either hard drive. Am I missing something? Why is this happening?
Perhaps one has a 100MB boot partition, which got rounded to the .12 GB difference you're seeing?

Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:54 am
by m1st
Another possibility is that one of the drives is partitioned as a GPT drive and the other as an MBR drive. GPT puts a ~128MB metadata area at the beginning of the drive IIRC...

Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 2:28 am
by HFat
Blood wrote:Looking at S.M.A.R.T., the value for reallocated sector count is still at 200 and didn't drop a bit for either hard drive.
That's unlikely. You're probably looking at the wrong value.

In any case, there's no relationship between that and your partition's capacity (see the other comments).

Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 6:19 am
by washu
Assuming you don't need anything currently on the drives:

- Run "diskpart" from an administrator command prompt
- Type "list disk" to get a list of all your drives
- Type "select disk N" where N is one of your F3 drives. Be VERY careful that you are selecting the correct drive
- Type "clean". This will erase all and any partitioning on the drive.
- Repeat the select disk and clean for the other F3.

Exit, reboot and then check the drive sizes.


One other possibility: Are the drives the EXACT same model? Not just F3, but the whole model #. Different batches of the "same" drive can be slightly different in size. See if there is an LBA sector count on the label and if they are the same.

Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 8:04 pm
by Blood
m1st wrote:Another possibility is that one of the drives is partitioned as a GPT drive and the other as an MBR drive. GPT puts a ~128MB metadata area at the beginning of the drive IIRC...
Thanks, that was it.