[Sirius Black]

I am running Windows 7 64 bit. Recently, I purchased a 3 TB drive for the purpose of storing our dvd collection onto.
First off, it only show a total of 2.73 TB which really annoys me since somehow I magically lost 27 Gigs.
I don't know if the people at Western Digital simply round off to the nearest $$$ or is it actually possible to make the entire 3TB available.
The installed internal drive shows 3 separate partitions for this particular hard drive as follows:
Volume (Y): 746.52, Volume (X): 1301.48 and Volume (W): 746.52.
All partitions have been formatted to NTFS.
In all of the partitions, the option to "extend volume" is not available.
This is a very unfamiliar process for me and I don't understand too much about this.
Ideally, I would like to make this into one large drive with the entire "advertised" space available for use.
Please help.
Thank you.

Edited by Macboatmaster, 13 July 2012 - 05:15 PM.
to remove inappropriate language

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Not going to happen. No drive will ever show the complete advertised capacity due to the file system when you format it and also the way they configure the allocation tables. Below I have borrowed the explanation in it's full printed form to help.

We've had many questions regarding why hard drive capacities are always smaller than the amount they are advertised to contain. The difference in capacities is due to two different methods for defining what exactly the prefixes mega, giga, tera mean. In the computer world, these prefixes have different meanings depending on what exactly you are talking about. Hard drive manufacturers report the size of hard drives using the decimal definition of these terms (10^6, 10^9, 10^12 resepctively), whereas operating systems and other software use the binary definition of these terms (2^20, 2^30, 2^40). As you can calculate, these values are close, but not exactly the same. 10^6 is 1, 000, 000, but 2^20 is 1, 048, 576. Once we get to larger hard drive sizes, the difference really becomes noticeable. One gigabyte in binary is 1, 073, 741, 824 bytes (2^30), but in decimal it’s only 1, 000, 000, 000 bytes (10^9), which is a difference of 73, 741, 824 bytes (~70mb). So, when we're talking about storage size in gigabytes a hard drive's capacity as reported by the os will be about 7% less than what is advertised by the hard drive manufacturer. One solution to this is to talk about computer storage using binary prefixes so that there is no confusion about the exact amounts being talked about. In that system, a gibibyte (gib) is always 2^30 exactly. But, i wouldn't expect storage device manufacturers to adopt this method any time soon.

[rshaffer61]

Not going to happen. No drive will ever show the complete advertised capacity due to the file system when you format it and also the way they configure the allocation tables. Below I have borrowed the explanation in it's full printed form to help.

We've had many questions regarding why hard drive capacities are always smaller than the amount they are advertised to contain. The difference in capacities is due to two different methods for defining what exactly the prefixes mega, giga, tera mean. In the computer world, these prefixes have different meanings depending on what exactly you are talking about. Hard drive manufacturers report the size of hard drives using the decimal definition of these terms (10^6, 10^9, 10^12 resepctively), whereas operating systems and other software use the binary definition of these terms (2^20, 2^30, 2^40). As you can calculate, these values are close, but not exactly the same. 10^6 is 1, 000, 000, but 2^20 is 1, 048, 576. Once we get to larger hard drive sizes, the difference really becomes noticeable. One gigabyte in binary is 1, 073, 741, 824 bytes (2^30), but in decimal it’s only 1, 000, 000, 000 bytes (10^9), which is a difference of 73, 741, 824 bytes (~70mb). So, when we're talking about storage size in gigabytes a hard drive's capacity as reported by the os will be about 7% less than what is advertised by the hard drive manufacturer. One solution to this is to talk about computer storage using binary prefixes so that there is no confusion about the exact amounts being talked about. In that system, a gibibyte (gib) is always 2^30 exactly. But, i wouldn't expect storage device manufacturers to adopt this method any time soon.

[Ztruker]

Open Disk Management.
In the lower pane, for each partition on the 3TB drive, right click and select Delete Volume.
Once all 3 are deleted, right click on the drive and select Create volume (or something like that).
Once it's created, right click on it and select Format, then chose Quick Format.

That should give you a single 2.73TB drive, though you may have problems with a partition of that size. You may be better off to car e it into two equal size partitions.

[Macboatmaster]

So my colleague rshaffer61 has explained why the 3TB shows as 2.73. , as I was just about to post the same

1 terabyte is 1000000000000bytes, or 1 trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes.

If it is a brand new drive and you have NOT partitioned it then I cannot understand why it has now three partitions.

If there is currently NO data on the drive, then you may go to disk management and delete those partitions and then format and create one partition using the whole available capacity of the drive. It still will NOT be the 3TB, but the conversion explained by my colleague



NOTE

Please - posted before I saw the above from my colleague Ztruker - two partitions are the better bet one of the whole drive is less advisable

[Sirius Black]

Ok, is it at all possible to have 2 partitions of the 2.73 total instead of the 3 I have now?

[Macboatmaster]

Yes


How to Access the Disk Management Utility
To access the Disk Management utility in Windows 7, go to the Start Menu, right-click on Computer, and select Manage. This will bring up your Computer Management window.



On the left-hand side, select Disk Management from the Storage section.



In the Disk Management section, you'll see the right-hand side of the window populate with your disk information, showing you the name, size, and type of each partition for the disks on your system.



Please keep in mind that the Disk Management utility can only manage file systems compatible with Windows operating systems, such as FAT16/FAT32 and NTFS. While it can see other types of partitions, such as ones created and formatted by Linux or other operating systems, it can only delete them. For more information on partition types, please see: Wikipedia's page on File Systems.


Deleting a Disk Partition
In some cases you'll want to remove a partition from your hard drive, either to make space to extend an existing partition, or redo the partition as a different size of File System. To remove a partition, right-click on the partition you're trying to remove and select 'Delete Volume'.



You'll be prompted to confirm your choice, to make you aware that if you remove the partition all data on it will be erased. Therefore, please make sure you've backed up any critical data on that partition prior to clicking Yes.



You'll now see the deleted partition showing as 'Free space' in the Disk Management utility.


Creating a Disk Partition
If you have "free" space on your hard drives, you can create partitions using the Disk Management utility. The actual logic behind using Primary, Extended, and Logical partitions is outside the scope of this tutorial. However, we recommend this very informative article, called What is a Partition.

You'll see unpartitioned space highlighted and labeled as 'Free space'.



To create a partition here, right-click the free space and select 'New Simple Volume' to bring up the 'New Simple Volume Wizard.'. Click Next.



The wizard will ask you for the size of the partition, which you can specify as you wish, using all or part of the total partition size.



Click Next where the Wizard will ask you to assign a drive letter to the partition or choose a different letter than the default one and, when done click Next.



You'll be asked for information on how the partition should be formatted. Keep in mind that if you wish to use this partition, it needs to be formatted. In most cases, you'll want to use NTFS. NTFS is the default and preferred file system since Windows NT, and provides increased performance, security, and fault tolerance compared to FAT16/FAT32.



SO the short answer is delete one and extend one of the other two into the unallocated space. -therefore ending with the two you wish and as recommended by my colleagues

NOTE the unallocated space must be to the right of the one you extend, when using disc management

If you use Easeus partition manager which is free, you can extend either way, either to the left right, but it is in your case easier to stay with disk management and simply start again as you wish.

You may of course ignore the references to Operating systems as you are of course using this HDD only for data storage

[rshaffer61]

Do as Ztrucker said and instead of 3 partitions just split the one partition in half. Either way you still will only end up with the 2.73 tb size.

[Sirius Black]

Thank you all for such speedy help with this.
I've split the drive in 2 and I am finally able to start loading files onto it.

Thanks again.

[Ztruker]

You're welcome, glad all is well.

[rshaffer61]

Ditto and we will monitor this till you have the system loaded and tested it for a couple of days. Please update us with your results be it the final or any other concerns.

[Macboatmaster]

and from me - hope all goes well

You may have the matter in hand, by way of an external drive, but do not miss the opportunity to create a system image and backup for your C Drive

http://windows.micro...em-image-backup

and even if you do have that on an external drive, it would do no harm to keep a second backup image on the 3Tb

[mbond65]

Also make sure its GPT not MBR, otherwise you won't get past 2tb on a single partition