Intel X25-M 160GB SSD - wiping issue

idata — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:27:07 GMT

Windows 7 is now only seeing the total capacity of my Intel X25-M 160GB SSD as ~149GB and I can't figure out what I did wrong (though I'm sure its something I did)

Ok here's what I did and what I've done to try to fix it:

I installed Vista Ultimate 64 bit initially and loaded the drivers from the disk shipped with my mobo. After having a few issues with drivers I decided to try to re-install the OS and start over. Turns out, I managed to write a second copy of the OS to the drive rather than just overwrite the existing copy (not sure how I managed to do this but I'm sure the whole superbowl thing was a distraction it turns out I didn't need).

At this point I decided to start over and used HDDErase 3.3 to wipe the drive. I used it and it came up as successful. When I rebooted I noticed that Windows was now only seeing the drive capacity at ~149GB's and I have no idea why, but its almost as if it didn't really wipe off the 2 os's.

I have since reinstalled Vista, upgraded to 7 64 and tried to run the optimizer and enabled trim hoping that one of the two would resolve the issue, but I'm still sitting at ~149GB. I'm certain I'm missing something here, anyone have any ideas what I did wrong?

My system:

Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD7

CPU: Intel Xeon W3520

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws PC3 16000 12GB (6 x 2GB) SSD: Intel X25-M 160GB SATA II MLC

OS: Windows 7 64 bit

Re: Intel X25-M 160GB SSD - wiping issue

idata — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:57:14 GMT

Hi,

Have a read up on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte or see below for my 5 AM explanation

The good news is you don't really have a problem

basically, 1 byte of information = 8 bits

1000 of these bytes makes up 1KB (kilobytes - think metric, 1000)

1024 of these makes up 1KiB (kibibytes - binary 2^10)

The problem lies in the fact we have two definitions that are used, and when they're used together, we get differing reported values of storage.

Most HDD manufacturers (Intel in this case) use the 'metric' definition; i.e. your hard drive is 160GB. That is 160,000,000,000 bytes.

But Windows uses the binary definition (1KiB = 1024 bytes... 1024KiB = 1 MiB... 1024MiB = 1 GiB) so therefore, you need to convert metric to binary, so to speak.

160,000,000,000 (reporte bytes)

divided by

1024 (bytes in a KiB)

= 156250000 KiB

divide this by 1024 to get MiB (mebibytes)

= 152587.890625

divide this by 1024 to get GiB (gibibyte) (how Windows reports your drive):

= 149.0116119384766 GiB

and that's why it appears you've lost space.

I hope this explains it well enough.

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Intel X25-M 160GB SSD - wiping issue

Re: Intel X25-M 160GB SSD - wiping issue