HELP! I have an unusual problem that cropped up on installing a couple of
new Seagate drives in my XP Professional, Pentium 4 system. After
installing the 160 GB drives, I noticed that they showed only 149 GB of
usable space. Being curious, I looked at the sector listings on my
defragmenter and discovered that 10 GB was reserved for "SYS". Thinking
that this might be associated with the restore fuction in Windows, I set the
restore setting to 1% of the drive, but there was no change in this reserved
space on the disk. I am using these disks for archival purposes and want to
use the whole drive for storage. What is this reserved space and how can I
get rid of it? Thanks for your help.

In uF5Ugw9DGHA.336@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl Al Haase wrote:
> HELP! I have an unusual problem that cropped up on
> installing a couple of new Seagate drives in my XP
> Professional, Pentium 4 system. After installing the 160 GB
> drives, I noticed that they showed only 149 GB of usable
> space. Being curious, I looked at the sector listings on my
> defragmenter and discovered that 10 GB was reserved for
> "SYS". Thinking that this might be associated with the
> restore fuction in Windows, I set the restore setting to 1%
> of the drive, but there was no change in this reserved space
> on the disk. I am using these disks for archival purposes
> and want to use the whole drive for storage. What is this
> reserved space and how can I get rid of it? Thanks for your
> help.

The 149 GB you're seeing reported as usable space is correct.
The reason for the discrepancy is due to the fact that
manufacturers list hard drive size using a decimal figure. A
"160 GB" drive contains 160 billion bits. Windows looks at your
drive and converts the capacity into a binary number. To arrive
at the capacity you're seeing displayed in the drives
properties sheet you need to do the math. Divide the capacity
that the manufacturer lists, 160,000,000,000 bytes, by the
binary value of a Gigabyte, which is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
That's 160,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 = 149.011 Gigabytes.

Here's an article from Western Digital's support site that
explains how this works. This is an industry standard and will
apply to a Seagate product as well.

Why is my drive displaying a smaller than expected capacity
than the indicated size on the drive label?

http://tinyurl.com/ber3c

You might want to take a look at this article:

The Hard Drive Size Discrepancy
http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v30/vic30.htm

If your disk defragmenter program is a third party application,
you might want to check with them on why any portion of a drive
would be "reserved". It's possible that a certain percentage of
the hard drive space must be empty in order for the program to
defragment the drive. Windows needs 15% free space in order for
the built-in Disk Defragmenter to run but nowhere have I seen
Windows label any portion of a hard drive as "SYS".

Nepatsfan