180GIG Western Digital gives 131GIG space...

I've bought a IDE HD Western Digital 180 GIG/8MB buffer, put it in the G3, format it with drive utility provided with OS 9.2.2. Guess what? It gave me 131 GIG instead of 165-170GIG! Where is the culprit?

Did you partition the drive? Having one BIG 130 GB partition isn't such a great idea...

From what I've read you need an ATA 133 controller to see more than 130 gigs on one drive. Unfortunately the fastest ATA bus in a mac without an add on ATA PCI controller is ATA 100 and on a G3 the fastest built in you'll see is an ATA 66 on a B&W. On the Beige G3's its even slower, either 16 or 33. Either way I'm not sure if partitioning is a way around it but you should try it. Try 2 X 80 partitions and see if the machine recognizes all of it.

Drives over 120GB need to have specific ATA6 support to see all of the space. Here's a link some info.

Ya that was a pain for me too I got two WD 160 drives & after I formatted them they only show like 120 gig or so.. This was on a dual 800... I think my ATA bus is a 66 they went to ATA 100 on the new windtunnel G4's but it;s been rather annoying that Mac has adopted the ATA bus for internal cheap drives but the controllers they put in are 2 to 3 years behind the PC market..!!!