Hard Drive Incorrect Capacity

patriceltic said:

21H2
I recently installed a 500gb hard drive. I noticed today that it says in the windows explorer a 225 gb hd is installed. What is that all about? Is this anything to do with my recent Macrium restore? Thanks.

Explorer only shows you the size of the partition on the drive. If you did a Macrium restore then the partitions will be the size of those on the image. There may well be unallocated space on the drive if the image you restored was an image of a 250GB drive.

Disk Management will show you the true size of the drive and how the partitions are arranged on it, including any unallocated space. click Start, type disk management, and open the 'Create and format hard disk partitions' app that the search will find.

Might also try right-click of the Start button, a bit quicker.

patriceltic said:

Thank you for that info. So in fact I do have 500GB - by using disk management I can allocate the rest of the capacity. True?

Yes, you can. There is an Extend feature but the tricky part is when a small partition exists before the unallocated space. One can create a new partiion in that space and use it for data storage, give it a drive letter such as D: and I label it as DATA.

It's really not cheating but in not describing the capacity correctly. What is advertised has a lot to do with how a bit, Byte, KiloByte, GigaByte and TerraByte is defined. It takes 8 bits to make a Byte, Kilo 1000, etc. Then there is the loss of capacity done by formatting, some formats take more room than others. And it usually doubles as the drive size doubles, e.g. 10MB on a 100MB drive, if I'm asked about getting a new drive I explain the same, get the next larger than what the client thinks is needed. An example is my External 4TB USB drive: