External Hard Drive doesn't have the marked space

I just got a new external hard drive from Western Digital which is supposed to have 250 G of space in it. I've had external drives before and they always had a few mbs missing when I open the file which I always assumed was formatting or some other normal thing taking up space on the drive. However, this is excessive. The drive only has 235 G (when I look at it in the finder and in Disk Utility). I formatted (extended journaled to use it with time machine) and it's the same thing.
Would formatting with 7-Pass Erase or something like that make a difference? Why is there so much space missing from my hard drive?
Thanks
Marie

there is nothing you can do here. this is the result of the well-known [bait and switch marketing tactics by HD manufacturers|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30065-en]. the advertised capacity is in decimal BGs (250) and the actual capacity is in binary GB (235). all drive manufacturers do it and you should be aware of this when buying hard drives.
Message was edited by: V.K.

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External Hard Drive doesn't have the marked space

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