Let's say I buy two drives - same make model, same 'theoretical' size as per specifications of the drives. I format drive 1 with Windows 2003 let's say to create a C drive and get a certain size in properties of the drive. I then format drive 2 with the same Windows installation to create a D drive. Is it possible that the two drives could be slightly different as far as Windows is concerned after the formatting even though they were supposedly the same manufacturer raw size?
As far as the manufacturer raw size goes, regardless if they are exactly the same per manufacturer testing, is it possible that Windows might see two different raw sizes out of the box?
Finally as far as manufacturer raw size, is there a 'fudge' factor - e.g. same make/model drive but one has x bad blocks and the other has y bad blocks out of the box just because of the nature of manufacturing process so that they would report as different sizes with Windows?
The reason I'm asking is that I ran into a situation where I had two same make/model drives out of the box and went to software mirror them. The only way it worked was if I reduced the size of the source partition with Partition Magic and given that nothing I could do would make the source drive 'bigger' than it came out of the box, my conclusion was that for some reason the 'target' was smaller. As well, I have had similar situations with Ghost - I have two identical drives per specification but when I go to Ghost one is smaller. So it was those types of situations that prompted me to wonder about the structure of hard drives in general and how this could come about 'theoretically' or be told that in theory it was impossible. So far I have asked in all kinds of places and not gotten a good theoretical explanation why these events take place. It has been suggested that drives with the same specs may have, due to the inherent variation in manufacturing processes, different numbers of bad blocks out of the starting gate which would explain why one of my drives would have been smaller than another. However others have countered that each drive comes with blocks to spare for that kind of situation and they would get swapped in so I would never see a difference based on bad blocks. So I still don't know. I was hoping to find somebody here who has been involved intensely with hard drives - maybe somebody who creates partitioning/hard drive recovery/formatting software and thus would be able to say with experiential and theoretical authority - 'Yes, what you are saying is possible' or 'No, it's impossible' because ... '