On Thu, 1 Feb 1996, Simon Burge wrote:

> On Jan 31,  6:39am, der Mouse wrote:
> 
> > The other problem is that iomega calls their disks 100MB, while NetBSD
> > says they're 96MB.  As far as I can tell, NetBSD is telling the truth
> > here and iomega is lying.  If you want this fixed, you'll have to go
> > talk to iomega.
> 
> We see this sort of thing all the time with the machines here with
> 96Mbytes of memory.  96MB == 100663296 bytes.
> 
> Simon.
Over the Christmas break I got a "1.6"GB Western Digitial hard drive.
On page 48 of the instalation guide in the Questions and Answers I quote:
=======================================================================
Q: What is a megabyte (MB)?
A: This is an area of confusion.  Hard drive suppliers define a decimal
megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes(106).  Alternatively a binaray megabyte is 
defined as 1,048,576(220).  This is why some utilities show 540 MB while
others show 528 MB for the same drive.  See the following table.
....
Drive	 Capacity CMOS(MB) CHKDSK(MB)
...
AC31600    1624.6   1549.4  1624.6

===================================================================
This 4-5% difference could explain the 96MB(binary) vs 100MB(decimal).

Does anyone know who was the first Hard drive supplier to introduce
a "decimal megabyte" to make their drives look larger than they 
actually are?

johnh...