Elements HD has less space than it's supposed to and marks it already in use.

[fmulder]

Hello. I recently bought a WD Elements 1TB external HD, right out of the box I plug it in (my machines both have XP) and it says that there's 1.25 GB in use already (930GB free out of 931).

Things I did:

Checked for hidden files and found nothing; I used a machine with Xp SP2 with little or no updates (PIII 800 MHz), a machine with Xp SP3 and updated today (Celeron 1.4 GHz) and with Vista with SP1 (AMD 1.8 GHz I believe, not my machine). All give the same result: 930 GB free out of 931 GB total.

Checked under Linux (Kubuntu 9.10) and it says there's nothing in it, but it does detect 931.4 GB of free space, which is what I'm supposed to have.

I checked the site which mentions that compatibility may vary depending on user's hardware configuration and operating system, but mentions nothing of the storage problem I have. The diagnostic software from their site says that the drive is healthy. It's 1.25 GB out of 931 GB, so the loss is not that big, but I'm still intrigued.

I formatted the drive with NTFS (which is what it was originally in) and I got the same results.

Has anybody run into this problem before or has any idea what's going on? Thanks for your time.

[Ardvark]

Are you sure it's an Elements and not a SmartWare drive? That is rather odd that it would be showing in that manner....