Each disc drive has a specified number of sectors, or logical blocks, available for customer use. In your case, this would be, according to our spec for this drive, 16841664 sectors. Each of these sectors can hold 512 bytes of user data. This results in a total capacity for the drive of (16841664 X 512) 8.622 Gigabytes of storage.
In order to access this many sectors, the ATA controller uses a translation. For this capacity of drive, your system BIOS has chosen a translation of 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors per track. This translation gives 8.4 GB, a common limitation for BIOSs. Since the system can only access sectors that can be described under the translation it has assigned, you therefore have access to (16383 X 16 X 63) 16514064 sectors for total usable storage space of (16514064 X 512) 8.455 Gigabytes.
Note that this space is available on the drive, and the limitation of the system BIOS is the only reason you cannot access it. If you need this space, it may be possible to upgrade the BIOS or use our Disk Manager program to allow you to access the full capacity. Disk Manager (available on our website) is an overlay that will handle the capacity, rather than use the restricted capability of the BIOS.
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