Why does 300gb Intel SSD (no partition) says available space is 239199mb?

I recently purchased few Intel 320 series 300gb. Some show correct available space, 279.39GB. However, some of them show 239.20GB is available.

I tried "clean" commend in Diskpart, also tried wiping all the partitions in Linux Mint.

Can it be a HW issue and nothing can be done?

Or

Can someone help? :P

Solution 1:

The Intel 320 series SSD drives support the SET MAX ADDRESS command which means the previous owner may well have reduced the space available to the OS via some utility (e.g. hdparm).

Here's the relevant excerpt from the 320 series specifications:

The best way to recover this "lost" space is to boot a Linux Mint DVD/USB Key (so that the attached SSD drive is not in use) and execute the following command in Terminal:

sudo hdparm -N p# /dev/sdX

Where # is the number of sectors you want to make available to the OS, and sdX is of course sda/sdb/sdc as appropriate. In your case, the maximum number of sectors will be 586072368 (this is also in the specs):

WARNING the above command will likely wipe any existing data on the drive. Also, once you execute the command, fully shut down the PC so that the drive properly resets itself. Then do a CLEAN command in Diskpart and finally partition/format/install Windows/whatever.

SECOND POSSIBILITY Unlikely, but you may have been sold counterfeit drives. But honestly I haven't heard of counterfeit Intels.