So I buy the 120 gig HD.

Set Up The Transfer cable to my 20 gig for swapping over.

Whole thing takes 1 hour and 20 minutes, No prob there.

Hook up my 120 drive and everything is dandy.

Go to memory and wamma 90.7 gb free.

So 120 minus 20 = 100 right?

Not with MS it would appear.

I mean whats the story here.

I know I have loads of space but what happened to my 10 gigs.

I have been told it is to accomadate various things but my 20 gig was already doing that anyway.

you forgot to include the HDD file format which is about 10GBs for a 120GB HDD.

120 gb hard drive only has 113 GB i think but its not the full 120 they advertise

The HDD uses some space on its own,That sounds about right,i cant use 40 of my gigs,if i go over 70 gigs i wont be able to watch movies or play games.

thats a real good point about how the 20 was doing whatever the 120 is doing

Hard Drive 101

It doesn't work like that, really...

Yeah, no HDD has the full capacity free initially. My 300GB only had about 280 free before I installed Windows etc on my PC. Just the way it works. Unfortunately the larger the HDD the more "lost" space.

Yes I hear what you are saying but my 20 gig was already doing that.

As the HDD gets larger so does the internally used space.

So while a 20GB would only be missing 1GB or so, a 100GB is missing 10GB or so, a 500GB would be missing 30GB or so, and so on. Its all relative.