Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
At 20:39 -0300 on 06/26/2006, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote about Re:
Western Digital Loses Class Action-Reply by July 15th f:
In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
on 06/26/2006
at 03:51 PM, "Pommier, Rex R." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
So let me see if I get this straight. Western Digital sold disk
drives that they tagged as 80 GB. They used 1,000,000,000 bytes per
GB instead of the binary number. Somebody got confused and decided
to sue.
Why didn't the WD lawyers trot out the SI standard? This should have
been a summary judgement for the defendant.
I agree. GB is based on K=1000. The Binary (K=1024) Measure is given in
GiB.
IMHO it is example where nobody follows official standards. I have never
seen GiB/KiB etc. in any documentation, not only IBM. I don't claim it
is good, since 1000 vs 1024 ambiguity can be misleading.
However it is not the only example. IDE specification simply does not
exist *officially*. Does it mean that millions of desktop PC users have
any headache with that ? Absolutely no. Many years ago, in The Very Old
Days some folks can have a problem when connecting Seagate drive on the
same bus with WDC drive. But, as we say, "it was long time ago, and not
true".
Another example would polish official standard for character set and
keyboard. Character set is not dead by accident, however it is used only
in Internet applications, but the keyboard layout is completely dead.
Nobody uses it, nobody saw such keyboard.
Another example would be USS. It can be ship, but it also means Unix
System Services. Even IBM uses this acronym in their documentation,
despite of shout made some folks.
Or were they playing games with formatted versus unformatted?
You HAVE to list as Unformatted since the Formatted Capacity is based on
what Directory Structure you use (NTFS, FAT32, HFS, HFS+, Unix/Linux
Formats, etc.) as well as the Allocation Units (which affect how much
fits on a track, IIRC) and thus is variable.
Not exactly. Every manufacturer provides *formatted* capacity, but the
*low level format* is mentioned. Since user can no longer low level
format the drive, providing unformatted capacity is completely
senseless. The last drives I remember, which had *both* capacities were
80-120 MB units. It was Quantum, AFAIR.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
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