I have 5 of the same Maxtor 250 Gig SATA HDD running in my three machines. 4 of them are not partitioned and they each show a maximum of 232 Gig when viewed in the windows explorer. My 120 Gig HDs never show more that 110 Gig. I believe a lot of this is taken up for potential mapping of the hard drive sectors. Finding where you put the pieces of a file on a 250 Gig HD takes alot of mapping.
Regards,