Seagates are great, and ALL the capacity you paid for is there. Really!
Your mileage may vary, but over the past 25+ years, I have found Seagate drives to be much more reliable than Western Digitals, and Maxtors aren't even in the race.
To compute available disk space, you must know the math behind it. In decimal, 1 terabyte would be 1,000,000,000,000. In binary, it would be 2^40, or 1,099,511,627,776. A 1.5TB drive has 1,500,000,000,000 bytes (plus a few more). Divide that by 2^40, and you will get about 1.36TB, which is the capacity expressed in binary.
To convert between decimal and binary for a drive measured in gigabytes, use 2^30; for megabytes, use 2^20; for kilobytes, use 2^10 (which is 1024, commonly called 1 kilobyte, or 1000 decimal). In that last case, the difference is only 24 per kilobyte, but by the time you get up into terabytes, the difference is over 99.5 billion, and people start to wonder where it all went!
The label on your Seagate drive claims 1500Gbytes. That is in decimal. In binary, that converts to about 1.36TB. So, you have not been cheated out of any capacity; it's simply a matter of the method of notation.
To see the exact numbers for your drive, open Windows Explorer (My Computer), right-click on your drive, click Properties. You will see its capacity in decimal and in binary.
To crank through those numbers using my values above, you can use the Windows calculator. In XP, click Start Run. In Win7, just click Start. Enter CALC. Click View Scientific to access the x-to-the-y key (2 keys left of the 4 key). Tap 2 (for binary), then x-to-the-y, then 40 (for tera); press Enter. The rest is simple arithmetic, and should reveal the mysteries to you.
If any of that is unclear, just ask most any teenager with glasses to help. [:-)Read full review
