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?
Hard drive lose capacity over time
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Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time
Perhaps one has a 100MB boot partition, which got rounded to the .12 GB difference you're seeing?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?
Re: Hard drive lose capacity over time
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
That's unlikely. You're probably looking at the wrong value.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.
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
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.
- 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
Thanks, that was it.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...