On 07/07/08 04:59 PM, mm wrote:
> How big is a gigabyte in hard drive advertising and packaging?
>
> From another newsgroup, I suppose it's true:
>
> Coverage of a recent New Mexico Supreme Court case said that
> states were getting bold in finding excuses to void arbitration
> agreements under general state contract law and the U. S. Supreme
> Court was consistently refusing to review the state decisions.
>
> The New Mexico case was a class action suit against Dell for
> rating hard drive capacity in decimal instead of binary gigabytes.
> The class included people who ordered computers from Dell's web
> site. Dell requires users of their web site to agree to Texas law
> and arbitration of individual claims only. The artibtration clause
> and class action waiver are legal under Texas law. New Mexico law,
> the court decreed, includes a fundamental right to bring a class
> action. Class action arbitration was not possible under the rules
> in effect (though that may change) therefore the case could be tried
> in New Mexico state court.
>
> (It was one of those cases where I wanted both sides to lose.
> Dell, for making it practically impossible to get relief if
> they had actually done something wrong. The plaintiff, for
> caring about the trivial difference between 2^30 and 10^9.)
> -- end quote --
>
> But someone else says the normal manner of business is to use
> 1,000,000,000 bytes for a gigabyte.
>
> I thought that formatted drives had fewer bytes capacity than
> unformatted drives, because of the overhead used by formatting** but
> that on the box and in the advertising for a hard drive, a gigabyte
> meant 1024^3. Is that true?
>
>
> **Space allowed for directory information is the only overhead I can
> think of. Is there more?
>
>
>
> If you are inclined to email me
> for some reason, remove NOPSAM :-)


This is a recurring confusion, and it has been a mix-up for many years now.

There have been attempts at changing the prefixes, but those are not so
widely spread or used. How many uses Kibi- or Gibi-bytes in specs today?

IEC:s definition: http://www.iec.ch/zone/si/si_bytes.htm

(If we only had eight fingers, I'd think that problem would not exist.)

/Rolf

Rolf Blom <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On 07/07/08 04:59 PM, mm wrote:
>> How big is a gigabyte in hard drive advertising and packaging?
>>
>> From another newsgroup, I suppose it's true:
>>
>> Coverage of a recent New Mexico Supreme Court case said that
>> states were getting bold in finding excuses to void arbitration
>> agreements under general state contract law and the U. S. Supreme
>> Court was consistently refusing to review the state decisions.
>>
>> The New Mexico case was a class action suit against Dell for
>> rating hard drive capacity in decimal instead of binary gigabytes.
>> The class included people who ordered computers from Dell's web
>> site. Dell requires users of their web site to agree to Texas law
>> and arbitration of individual claims only. The artibtration clause
>> and class action waiver are legal under Texas law. New Mexico law,
>> the court decreed, includes a fundamental right to bring a class
>> action. Class action arbitration was not possible under the rules
>> in effect (though that may change) therefore the case could be tried
>> in New Mexico state court.
>>
>> (It was one of those cases where I wanted both sides to lose.
>> Dell, for making it practically impossible to get relief if
>> they had actually done something wrong. The plaintiff, for
>> caring about the trivial difference between 2^30 and 10^9.)
>> -- end quote --
>>
>> But someone else says the normal manner of business is to use
>> 1,000,000,000 bytes for a gigabyte.
>>
>> I thought that formatted drives had fewer bytes capacity than
>> unformatted drives, because of the overhead used by formatting** but
>> that on the box and in the advertising for a hard drive, a gigabyte
>> meant 1024^3. Is that true?
>>
>>
>> **Space allowed for directory information is the only overhead I can
>> think of. Is there more?
>>
>>
>>
>> If you are inclined to email me
>> for some reason, remove NOPSAM :-)
>
>
> This is a recurring confusion, and it has been a mix-up for many
> years now.
>
> There have been attempts at changing the prefixes, but those are not
> so widely spread or used. How many uses Kibi- or Gibi-bytes in specs
> today?
>
> IEC:s definition: http://www.iec.ch/zone/si/si_bytes.htm
>
> (If we only had eight fingers, I'd think that problem would not exist.)

Feel free to cut off two of yours and find that it still does.