Going to ask whiskey tango foxtrot on this Inq article:

Ingenu said:
It is correct, HDD have indeed hidden space.
your joking right? i read that article earlier today, and thought, there goes the inq again. Wow, I must say thats interesting.

later,
epic
 
80GB drive sooo tempting... must restrain...

Hmm it seems to me that there must be some reason that there isn't already an open partition there, is it not reliable or something? Maybe your drive will explode in firey death or something.
 
Sxotty said:
80GB drive sooo tempting... must restrain...

Hmm it seems to me that there must be some reason that there isn't already an open partition there, is it not reliable or something? Maybe your drive will explode in firey death or something.
My bet is that it is purely a manufacturing thing. Why make several different models with different numbers of platters and all if you can just make one and then program it to ignore that space that "shouldn't be sold"? In some cases this might make a lot of sense for the drive manufacturer and possibly even save them money as they don't have to stock as many models or change their manufacturing process (even slightly) for different models.
 
Razor04 said:
Sxotty said:
80GB drive sooo tempting... must restrain...

Hmm it seems to me that there must be some reason that there isn't already an open partition there, is it not reliable or something? Maybe your drive will explode in firey death or something.
My bet is that it is purely a manufacturing thing. Why make several different models with different numbers of platters and all if you can just make one and then program it to ignore that space that "shouldn't be sold"? In some cases this might make a lot of sense for the drive manufacturer and possibly even save them money as they don't have to stock as many models or change their manufacturing process (even slightly) for different models.

No. Drives get more space by physically having more heads and platters... that itself isn't artificial. This "extra partition" business is using that extra non-data area of each platter that is for calibration, bad block control(the drive thinks that a block will go bad, it copies the data from it to the "extra" area, remaps that block, and marks the old as bad), etc.
 
The Inquirer has follow ups on this story

All this probably does is to create an invailid partition table which ends up having:

|...new partition.............................
|old partition.................................|

overlapping partitions. So writing either partition will corrupt the other. It probably so happens that whatever situation people tried it, it just so happened that the (quick) format of the "new" partition didn't corrupt the other partition to make it unbootable.

And the 200G -> 510Gb "upgrade" probably has ended up with three overlapping partitions....

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14608
 
AFAIK, HDDs do have hidden space for "back-ups." Of course, it is not possible to show these hidden space via the said method. These space are used when the HDD encounter a unstable sector, and HDD will try to relocate this sector to a new place, in the hidden space.

As for this story, the "corrupted paritition table" theory is the most possible explanation, IMO.
 
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