Re: GB vs. MB

Rob Hagopian (Rob.Hagopian@vuser.vu.union.edu)
Wed, 27 Nov 1996 02:42:00 -0500


>> I don't know of too many SCSI floppy drives though... :-)
>
>The Zip drive counts I think. It is 93 to 100 MB, depending
>on what a MB is and which bytes you include in your count.

Yes, and it's different formatted or unformatted... (1.4 [1.44] MB
floppies are also 2.0MB unformatted... I don't know if the latter is in
10^6 or 2^20 notation :-|)

>> I think that linux should report what's true, not what the
>> marketers shove down our throats. A megabyte is 2^20, it
>> should be reported as such.
>
>People expect a disk MB to be 10^6 now, so maybe Linux should
>do what people expect. With 2^20, it looks like Linux makes
>disks get smaller.

I _*WISH*_ Linux did what I expected :-)
Seriously, even BIOS to BIOS will report different sizes for a HD.
Linux shouldn't sucumb to such a low level. When I see MB come out of
linux, I expect it to mean MegaByte (2^20). When I see it in an ad, that's
when I expect it to mean MarketingByte (10^6 :-).
Of course, we could always report everything in bytes, that'd be
consistant :-)

>I think we should just be glad that hard disk manufacturers
>don't throw in a factor of 4 for compression -- not yet anyway.

Yet. I shudder to think what will happen if/when we get hardware
compression on drives.
-Rob