How do I Check my Hard Drive Capacity in Windows XP?

Your hard drive is a storage device that quickly records data as magnetic pulses on spinning metal platters. It is the workhorse component of every computer. Hard drives provide long-term storage for data on your PC. The storage capacities for hard drives seem to grow larger each year.


A bit about Hard Drives
The maximum capacity of a hard drive is determined by a certain set of parameters that describes how the drive and computer will interact. In some cases, changing a single increment of a single parameter may result in the change of the total capacity of the hard drive by well over 100 megabytes.

There are some hard drive controllers and some computers that are unable to utilize the correct parameters for a particular drive. To correct this situation an automatic or manual adjustment of the parameters has to be done. These adjustments may not change the overall capacity of the drive.

Another main factor in determining the capacity of a hard drive is how the manufacturer rates it. Some hard drive manufacturers believe that one-megabyte is the equivalent of one million bytes while another may see it a different way and call one megabyte the equivalent of 1024 bytes squared. By using the one million bytes per megabyte rule, a drive can be described as being larger.

It is always a good thing to check your hard drive capacity. You will want to know just how much of the hard drive space you are utilizing. Many computers come with hard drives with very large storage capacities, but because of the different applications and files and other data that we download or create, we end up using a great portion of the hard drive space. This may cause you to be unable to store an extremely large file on your computer. You can also find out when you may need to delete some of the files you are storing so you can free up some of the space on your hard drive.

Check your Hard Drive
Click on the Start button located in the lower left corner of the Taskbar.
In the menu that pops up, click on My Computer to open the window.
Single click on the Local Disk (C:). You will see the size of the hard drive at the bottom of the blue bar on the left of the window.
If you do not see it, then click on Details. you will see how big the hard drive is under Total Size in GB and how much of that space is unused (Free Space)/li>