Hardrive

Installed a new Seagate 160GB, but my computer only reads 127GB. What gives?

You need Windows XP service pack 1 or later, Windows 2000 service pack 4 or later, and also your motherboard needs to support 48-bit LBA.

I bought a 250 and it reads 232, is that a compatibility issue as well, or is it the dark dark math of misadvertised platter sizes?

The latter. Hard-drive-manufacturer-gigabytes are 1000000000 bytes (10^9), OS gigabytes are 1073741824 bytes (2^30).

>>3
This phenomemon is known as "marketing bytes"

>>3
Hard disk vendors bullshit about them.

>>4
Those are not GigaBytes, and there is no such thing as "OS GigaBytes". A "GigaByte", without adjectives, is 2^30 Bytes, and is abbreviated GB (i.e. uppercase). Everything else is (most often intentionally) incorrect.

>>6
Officially the IEC wants us to use the ridiculous term "gibibyte" (GiB) for true binary gigabytes (2^30), and "gigabyte" (GB) for "marketing" gigabytes (10^9). Technically they are right because 10^9 is in line with all other SI prefixes (gigawatt, etc), but almost nobody ever uses the term "gibibyte", which sounds stupid and childish, and everyone sticks to "gigabyte" and uses it interchangably (with much confusion for noobs all around).

>>7
But the IEC is run by fags. Gibibyte sounds like some kind of sex game for gays. Whoever came up with that name should be burnt. Information Science people invented GigaBytes, and they defined them as 2^30. Everything else is modern bullshit.

Also ontop of that there's the small overhead created by the filesystem aswell.