Re: [PATCH] scsi/sd: Fix size output in MB

James Smart
2008-08-31T12:28:25Z

Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> Reasonable minds can certainly disagree on this one. I respectfully
> submit that reporting a 97415MB capacity is less useful than reporting a
> 97GB capacity. If you look at drive advertisements, they sell 1TB,
> 1.5TB, 80GB, 750GB, 360GB, ... we should be trying to match that. I'm a
> little dubious about trying to match the 1.5TB; I think 1500GB is close
> enough, but a 50GB drive shouldn't be reported as 50000MB. IMO, anyway.

Since when did techies start paying attention to marketing statements ?

We should be doing what's natural and *consistent*, which is typically
dealing with power-of-2. Saying it's one thing at one level, and when
the natural use (how many 512 byte sectors get added up later) changes
that number in a different level, you've created even more confusion.
There's no consistency.

As far as user concern - they've seen this discrepancy in the PC/Windows
world for years now... Why should we be taking on the task to solve or
answer it now ? Throw in different overheads for filesystem metadata
loss, volume manager metadata, raid level loss, etc - you'll never be
able to explain it all to the user. And personally, I'd rather have
natural numbers so that if I do understand the uses, I can do
calculations without doing number-base conversions.

-- james s