"Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)" wrote: (after someone else wrote)
>>Only if you want to match up with the vendor numbers. ;). Disk >>x-bytes are always in multiples of 10 instead of powers of 2 > Always is a long time. There is no industry standard; > even a unit of 2^10*10^3 is or was common. For disks with 512 byte, or other power of two, fixed block size that makes some sense. Otherwise, the 3330 is just over 100,000,000 bytes at full track blocks. >>I guess the vendors wanted the numbers to look bigger. I believe so, driven by the marketing department. > No, for that they gave the unformatted[1] capacity. For drives without a built in controller (formatter) that makes some sense. 1.44M floppies are still called 2M (unformatted). (One could always write full track blocks, and use all that space.) When SCSI and IDE drives with built in formatter and preformatted at 512 byte blocks came out, it made somewhat less sense. It used to be common for the model number to be based on the unformatted size. The ST506 and ST412 are 5MB and 10MB drives, respectively, with unformatted capacity of 6MB and 12MB. > [1] Low level, not file system. -- glen ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
