Wrong HDD format size?

[Raven]

I recently bought a 500gb drive and formatted it in NTFS through Computer Management. Normally when you format a drive it will take anything between 5-10gb as an unusable partition i.e. a 300gb drive might turn into a 294gb drive for instance.

But my 500gb drive has turned into 465gb. Does that sound right? Someone else told me the same thing happened to them as well with the same size drive. It shouldn't be that big of a loss, should it? And I'm fairly sure it has nothing to do with the brand or anything; it's all to do with the file system you're using.

Is there a different method of formatting that I should be using instead to gain the use of more of the space closer to the 500gb total?

[David75]

500,000,000,000 Bytes divide by 1024
488,281,250 kBytes divide by 1024 again
476,837 MegaBytes and divide again by 1024

And you have: 465 GigaBytes

Manufacturers play with terms allowing them for better numbers.

when they say 500GB, its GB using the usual numbering system.

But a computer uses the other way as explained

[Animeniax]

That's correct, all of my 500GB only have 465GB usable space. NTFS has the most overhead of all the file systems because of it's feature set and that consumes space for the partition information and file tables. Also, what David75 said.

[Raven]

Ok, thanks guys for the info. It just seemed like a massive jump from about 5-10gb to 35.