Excuse me this dumb nub question, but when I recently had hard drive issues, I bought one of these WD 80GB hard drives refurbished from MicroCenter.

During the tedious conversations I had with their employees and numerous tech support calls, I was told some where along the line that all hard drives were partitioned to leave just a smidge of 'elbow room.' Like when I look at my internal hard drive, it says '153 GB capacity,' even though I purchased this computer with a 160 GB HD.

This isn't the same thing? Or did I misunderstand what those people meant?