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Dell XPS 13 - SSD less than promised in size
Receive my new Dell XPS 13 laptop. Looks great, feels great. Not very happy when I noticed that the 128 GB solid state drive is only 98.9GB (or 106 billion bytes). I know most hard ware supplier are a bit dodgy in how to calculate this, but but that is a big difference.
Spoke to Dell support and was told how they calculate is and that 128 is really 119. Still less than what I got. They then told me that the factory creates a lot of waste on the hard drive when setting up the PC. Recomended me to strip all software and set it up from scratch... Not impressed Dell.
nimbystripes
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July 2nd, 2012 23:00
Really? Is that what they told you? Not a very helpful support, eh? Anyway, I also got a laptop with SSD, but I got the whole 128GB attached. Maybe I got a bit lucky.
Mooseman334
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July 3rd, 2012 00:00
No the guy seemed very new and inexperience. In your laptop does is actually say 128 GB or does is list 128 billion bytes?
DELL-Terry B
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July 24th, 2012 09:00
Mooseman334
The drive will have extra partitions from the factory, for diagnostics, the recovery partition, where the back up image is stored and the hibernate partition. So having the primary data partition showing up at about 100 GB is about right.
I do want to make sure that you have received the correct sized drive. You can check in the BIOS, start the system while tapping F2. You will be able to see the size of the HDD there. If you haven't taken a look please do, and if the drive is smaller than 128 gb shoot me a private message with your name and service tag.
TB
canova
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July 25th, 2013 09:00
A couple days ago I received my new Dell XPS 12 and am thrilled with laptop/tablet and with the battery life due to the Haswell chip. I had the same question about disk size and I found Terry B's comment about other partitions to be correct. In windows 8, some of these other partitions may be hidden. On the XPS 12, I used the following commands from the admin comand prompt:
diskpart
select Disk 0
list partition
exit
My 128GB drive on the XPS 12 came from the factory with the following partitions:
godfather666
14 Posts
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July 25th, 2013 11:00
This is perfectly normal, and is the case with all manufacturers, not just Dell.
It all has to do with the discrepancy between two things:
1. How manufacturers calculate GBs
2. How computers calculate GBs
For manufacturers, 1 GB is equal to 1 billion bytes. But due to the binary nature of computing, computers consider that 1024 bytes make 1 KB, 1024 KB make 1 MB, and 1024 MB make 1 GB.
Which means that 1 GB in manufacturers language actually means about 0.93 GB in computer language.
So your 128 GB SSD is really 119 Gb in the computer's method of counting.
As for why you only have 98.9 GB, it's because the rest is used as recovery partition.
But in summary, this isn't a Dell-specific issue. Buy a 1 TB hard drive from anywhere, and you'll see that the computer interprets it as just 909 GB!
mgear
7 Posts
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August 28th, 2013 21:00
I'd say that a 11gb recovery partition and 8gb mystery partition are hardly perfectly normal.
ejn63
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August 29th, 2013 05:00
They are normal for the way the system is configured. Once you have made a set of recovery media (to flash drive) you can remove that partition and recover the space.