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

Stuart Lynne
2001-12-21T22:55:54Z

> 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.

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