Harddrive size being reported incorrectly?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Travis Poppe <tlp at liquidx.org> writes:

> Hello, 
> 
> I've recently purchased an IDE 320GB Western Digital WD3200JB-22KFA0 
> harddrive for use in my FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE fileserver. The BIOS in the system 
> reports the drive as being a 320GB, but FreeBSD (dmesg) sees it as a 305245MB 
> (or 298GB drive) in two separate machines. When it has finally been formatted 
> for use, I get 289GB of available space.
> 
> Now, I understand that harddrive manufacturers measure things differently 
> (1000kbytes per gbyte rather than 1024, or something like that) than 
> expected, but I've been told by a few people that I should be getting around 
> 305-312GB of available space after the drive has been formatted. 

Well, no.  305245MB is (305245x1024x1024), or just a *hair* larger
than 320 x 10e10 bytes.  So what FreeBSD reports is exactly what you
should expect from the manufacturer's specification.

> sysinstall had to adjust the drive geometry because the reported one was 
> 'invalid'. I tried to manually specify the geometry BIOS reported, but this 
> too was rejected as invalid. 
> 
> BIOS Geometry-CYL/HD/SECT: 65535/16/255 

C/H/S geometries are (more or less) fictitious these days anyway.  I
let the installer do what it wants, and haven't had a problem in a
long time.

> Am I really getting the full potential out of this drive, or is something 
> wrong? 

Looks like things are working fine.