Re: Changing KB, MB, and GB to KiB, MiB, and GiB in Configure.help.

Stuart Lynne (sl@fireplug.net)
Fri, 21 Dec 2001 14:55:22 -0800


> If you would pay more attention, you can see that on most drives there is
> a small note that says: 1MB = 1000000 bytes. This is why the drive
> capacity is smaller than the manufacturer says.

http://www.seagate.com/products/discsales/discselect/A1a2.html#cap

Capacity:
Capacity is the amount of data that the drive can store, after
formatting. Most disc drive companies, including Seagate, calculate disc
capacity based on the assumption that 1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes and 1
gigabyte=1000 megabytes.

Disks have a natural measurement of capacity based on an integral number
of 512byte blocks. So kilobytes (1024) makes sense for them.

The only marketing wizardry is to use the smaller of:

1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes

instead of:

1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes

There are valid arguements for both interpretations.

-- 
                                            __O 
Lineo - For Embedded Linux Solutions      _-\<,_ 
PGP Fingerprint: 28 E2 A0 15 99 62 9A 00 (_)/ (_) 88 EC A3 EE 2D 1C 15 68
Stuart Lynne <sl@fireplug.net>         www.lineo.com         604-461-7532
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/