GB vs MB - a proposal

Larry McVoy (lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com)
17 Dec 1996 08:11:05 GMT

Folks,
I've had to deal with GB == power of 2 or 10 quite a bit in
government contracts and with lmbench result reporting. There are a
bunch of good arguments on both sides of the issue. I've come up with
the following "standard" which I use in the new lmbench:

mb = 2^20
MB = 1,000,000

and so on. It seems to cause the least pain. I can still say

lmdd if=/dev/rsda0 bs=5k

and get 5*1024, which is a 512 byte block aligned request, which is what
a lot of unix systems want.

MB and mb don't conflict with the commonly used Mb which typically means
Mbits.

I know you will probably have issues with this, but can you deal?

--

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Larry McVoy     lm@sgi.com     http://reality.sgi.com/lm     (415) 933-1804