1. Disk capacities
- Posted by "Wallace B. Riley" <wryly at MINDSPRING.COM> Oct 26, 1997
- 643 views
Re Daniel Berstein's inquiry about the actual sizes of hard disk drives: Some years ago, when I was working for a major trade magazine, the convention was 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes, and 1 Kilobyte (with a capital K) = 1024 bytes. I'm not in that business any more, but if the convention still holds, then 1 megabyte would be 1 million bytes, and 1 Megabyte (capitalized) would be 1,048,576 bytes (not 1,024,000) But 1 Megabyte would still be 1,000 Kilobytes. (If you don't recognize that strange figure, get out your handy dandy pocket calculator and see what 2 raised to the 20th power is.) By extension, 1 gigabyte would be 1 billion bytes, and 1 Gigabyte would be 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 2 to the 30th power. The Society for Technical Writers and Publishers (STWP), which I think has changed its name to something more general, would have the latest official information on this matter. I don't recall what the new name is, but a good technical library would have the information. Wally Riley wryly at mindspring.com
2. Re: Disk capacities
- Posted by Daniel Berstein <danielberstein at USA.NET> Oct 27, 1997
- 622 views
On 26 Oct 97 , Wallace B. Riley wrote: > Re Daniel Berstein's inquiry about the actual sizes of hard disk > drives: > > Some years ago, when I was working for a major trade magazine, the > convention was 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes, and 1 Kilobyte (with a > capital K) = 1024 bytes. Thanks for that, but many people reply my inquiry and I got the reason: Unit Standard Disk manufacturers === ======= ============== KB 2^10 bytes 10^3 bytes MB 2^20 bytes 10^6 bytes GB 2^30 bytes 10^9 bytes TB 2^40 bytes 10^12 bytes Regards, Daniel Berstein danielberstein at usa.net http://www27.pair.com/daber/architek