Technical Background / Troubleshooting; Introduction - TrekStor USB-Storage 2.0 User Manual

3 Technical background / Troubleshooting

3.1 Introduction

For storing data, every hard-disk has to be partitioned, a primary and eventually extended parti-
tions have to be created on the disk, and a file system has to be assigned to it. A different drive
letter is assigned to each partition.
Next, the partitions have to be formatted in order to store data. When formatting a partition the
operating system deletes any data, checks all sectors marking damaged ones so they won't be
used and reserves a certain amount of disk-space besides the Data Region where the actual data
is stored. Therefore formatting hard-drives reduces the available disk-space. How much depends
on the system but it generally reduces only by a few percent.
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