On 2/16/2013 10:04 AM, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
Jerry Stuckle a écrit :On 2/16/2013 1:37 AM, Richard Hector wrote:Powers of 2 make sense when you're talking about RAM, where the modules have a certain number of binary address lines, so they naturally fall on those boundaries. For disks, there's no particular advantage, and manufacturers generally use proper prefixes. For network bandwidth, there's even less advantage, and 'binary' prefixes are hardly ever used.Incorrect. Disks still use powers of 2 - 512 bytes per sector, for instance.Big deal. The sector size is 2^9 bytes, but the sector count is a totally arbitrary number, and is orders of magnitude bigger. So the binary nature of the sector size is completely invisible in the disk capacity. Even SSDs or other flash storage don't have a binary capacity even though they are made of flash chips which have a binary capacity.
Not at all. Sector counts are integers. It is impossible to have a disk of 1,000,000 bytes (or 1,000,000,000 or any other direct multiple).
It is, however, quite possible to have a disk of 1,048,576 bytes, i.e. 8 sectors/track, 4 tracks/cylinder and 64 cylinders. That would be a 1MB disk.
As I said before - back in the 80's, some manufacturers started using 1,000 for 1K instead of 1,024 because it made their disks look larger. The same is true with bandwidth - it makes the link look faster.Maybe there is another reason than make figures look bigger : SI decimal prefixes have a legal value in many countries.
Sure. They do in the United States, also. But that isn't the point. Misleading advertising is.