New external harddrive and 106Mb unallocated - why

[Robert Moskowitz]

I just got a Toshiba Canvio Desk 2TB external HD that my plans are to 
delete the NTFS partition and put on an EXT4 one.

Thing is the first 106MB are unallocated.  Why?

If this was a Chinese product, I would be worried.  I actually found a 
'call home' USB stick once.  One MIGHT think that Toshiba has decent 
quality control.  But why the unallocated space; is this for sector 
replacement?

Actually, I probably would not delete the partition, but only reformat 
it as EXT4.

Seems to be a rather nice unit.  Drive did not power up until I 
connected the USB; very convient not to have to unplug it to save on 
power usage.