Reiability of wrong media (was: is out of 5-1/4" diskettes

From: George Currie <g_at_kurico.com>
Date: Fri Jan 22 11:33:22 1999

> ><RANT> There ain't no sech thing as a 1.44M disk. The IBM style of HD
> >3.5has 2 sides, 80 tracks per side, 18 sectors per track, and 512 bytes
> >per sector. If you multiply that out, you get 1.406 HONEST Megabytes
> >(1048576). The only way to get 1.44 out of that is to creatively
> >redefine a Megabyte to be 1024000 bytes. That leaves IBM in the position
> >of claiming that a megabyte of memory is 1048576 bytes, but that a
> >megabyte of disk space is 1024000 bytes! If IBM ran a donut shop, how
> >many donuts would there be in a dozen??? </RANT>

Not to stick up for IBM, but the fact is that most drive
manufacturers use 1000000 bytes to represent a megabyte since
that will yield a larger XXXMB value than using 1024000 (a
thousand K's) or 1048576 (a K worth of K's). Just check the specs
of any manufacturer to see.

On a side note, I had always understood that a megabyte was the
latter (a k k's). After all, why would we suddenly switch from our
nice little power of 2 representation at a megabyte over to the evil
world of decimal? It would be way weird to say that 16MB RAM !=
16MB disk storage.

George
Received on Fri Jan 22 1999 - 11:33:22 GMT