LaCie Two Big eSATA & USB
User Manual
page
6. Tech Tips
6.1. Available Storage Capacity
A gigabyte (GB) means 1,000,000,000 bytes. In
order to utilize a hard disk drive, it has to be formatted
first.
Formatting a disk consists of the following:
the operating system erases all of the bookkeeping
information on the disk, tests the disk to make sure that
all of the sectors are reliable, marks bad sectors (i.e., those
that are scratched) and creates internal address tables
that it later uses to locate information. Once formatted,
the actual available storage capacity varies, depending
on operating environment, and is generally about 5 to
10% less than the nonformatted capacity.
TeChNICAl NOTe:
Storage capacity of an ar-
ray depends on the RAID level. The capacity of a
RAID array can be found by multiplying the ca-
pacity of the drives in the array by the number of
non-redundant drives.
Tech Tips
