Mike Marlow wrote:
I've never seen the asterik, but I've never looked for it. There is
overhead on a fresh drive though that does eat into the capacity. There is
a low level format that is beneath the level of the operating system. Then
there is the filesystem you're refefring to. I guess I'm not familiar with
today's marketing practices, but it used to always be that the unformated
drive capacity is what was advertised and that was before the low level
format - what we used to call the hardware format. Then you put the
filesystem on top of that and lost even more capacity. Today you put
microsoft products on top of that and lose all of your capacity...

Since we went from MFM to IDE, nobody low-level formats anymore. Now
that the controller doesn't have to have intimate proprietary knowledge
of the drive, you don't need to low-level format. In fact, on most
machines, you can't, anymore. What you're saying was true a long time
ago, but it's not the reason for discrepancies, anymore. See this page
from Seagate, for example, on "Discrepancy Between Reported Capacity and
Actual Capacity,"

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...y_measure.html

which says, among other things, "Unfortunately there are two different
number systems which are used to express units of storage capacity;
binary, which says that a kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes, and decimal,
which says that a kilobyte is equal to 1000 bytes. The storage industry
standard is to display capacity in decimal."

See also, for example, this stat page on a random Seagate 160 GB drive:

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/...81,577,00.html

If you click the "capacity" link on that page, it sends you to:

http://www.seagate.com/products/disc...index.html#cap

Which says, "Capacity is the amount of data that the drive can store,
after formatting. Most disc drive companies, including Seagate,
calculate disc capacity based on the assumption that 1 megabyte = 1000
kilobytes and 1 gigabyte=1000 megabytes." So, they're explicitly saying
that it is a post-format size, so that's definitely not the issue. The
issue is that they have a definition of "gigabyte" that is completely
different from the rest of the industry, including the sizes reported by
the computers that use the drives.

Which was my point, when someone lectured me that a "K" is always 1024 -
it always is except when it's not.

-BAT

"Brett A. Thomas" wrote in message
...


Since we went from MFM to IDE...

We went from MFM?

--

-Mike-


geeze, nothing stays the same anymore

On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 02:11:18 -0500, Silvan
wrote:

Prometheus wrote:

The bad part is they are usually already soaked with grease and banged
up a lot, so I just let them go on their merry way, often with a
little regret...

Not much point in regret. Pallet wood is sort of like a bowl full of
plastic candy. It looks good until you taste it. Spiral nails, embedded
grits, knots, splits, and it's usually too thin to mill down into anything
useful besides. I don't even look through the pallet pile anymore. It's
too frustrating. So much work, so little useful wood.

That's why it's a little regret! I look at them, sigh, and think
about what it would do to my bits and blades if I ran into a nail or
embedded rock, then let them go.


Aut inveniam viam aut faciam

Brett A. Thomas wrote:

When hard drive manufacturers first started selling hard drives, they
"rounded down," and advertised drive capacities as being on the 10^x

Yes, thank you. You're right. I'm right.

I seem to recall that the old MFM and RLL drives actually delivered the
advertised capacity. Am I dreaming that? It was a long time ago. The
largest one of those I ever laid hands on was 80 megabytes, and I think it
would have actually been 80 megabytes if all the heads had been
working.

Boy, they don't make'em like they used to. My first computer that was MY
computer was put together out of complete junk parts like that. The 80 meg
drive had bad bearings, and it screamed like a jet engine. One or two of
the heads didn't work, and it had gazillions of bad sectors. It still
worked, and I used it for awhile, until I saved up enough money to buy one
of those new IDE deals. A 120 MB drive that I still have around here
somewhere.

More recently, I had a 40 gig (Maxtor) drive that was about 11 months old.
One morning, I came in to get on the computer, and the drive was clicking.
Just like that. Poof. Gone. I'll bet that damn gimp 80 meg RLL drive
would still work to the same limited extent that it was working twelve
years ago. Ugh. Fourteen years ago.

Wow. I knew my wife back then too. She was right around the same time I
was putting that POS together. Funny how 14 years ago seems an eternity in
computer terms, but just getting started on a marriage. (Well, 11 years of
marriage, and three years of incredible sex. Not necessarily in that
order.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/

"Silvan" wrote in message
Funny how 14 years ago seems an eternity in
computer terms, but just getting started on a marriage. (Well, 11 years
of
marriage, and three years of incredible sex. Not necessarily in that
order.

You know Silvan, I was reading this thread and I saw the above comment, and
I knew right away before I saw your name, it was you making it. Your
thinking on this subject has preceded you.

Upscale wrote:

marriage, and three years of incredible sex. Not necessarily in that
order.

You know Silvan, I was reading this thread and I saw the above comment,
and I knew right away before I saw your name, it was you making it. Your
thinking on this subject has preceded you.

On old computers or old women?

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/

"Silvan" wrote in message
Upscale wrote:
thinking on this subject has preceded you.

On old computers or old women?

One woman in particular. Can't say if she's old or not.

On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:21:56 GMT, Mike Marlow wrote:

"Brett A. Thomas" wrote in message
...

Since we went from MFM to IDE...

We went from MFM?

Er, yeah, in the 1980's, friend.

Upscale wrote:

"Silvan" wrote in message
Upscale wrote:
thinking on this subject has preceded you.

On old computers or old women?

One woman in particular. Can't say if she's old or not.

Depends on if I'm mad at her or not how old she is.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/

"Dave Hinz" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:21:56 GMT, Mike Marlow
wrote:

"Brett A. Thomas" wrote in message
...

Since we went from MFM to IDE...

We went from MFM?

Er, yeah, in the 1980's, friend.


.... failed attempt at humor - or you were ducking as that one went by. You
had to be ducking because it wasn't clever enough to have made it over your
head on its own.
--

-Mike-

"Dave Hinz" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:21:56 GMT, Mike Marlow
wrote:

"Brett A. Thomas" wrote in message
...

Since we went from MFM to IDE...

We went from MFM?

Er, yeah, in the 1980's, friend.

Had the MFM! What did I miss on the IDE and should I bring a friend?

"Brett A. Thomas" writes:
Mike Marlow wrote:
I've never seen the asterik, but I've never looked for it. There is
overhead on a fresh drive though that does eat into the capacity. There is
a low level format that is beneath the level of the operating system. Then
there is the filesystem you're refefring to. I guess I'm not familiar with
today's marketing practices, but it used to always be that the unformated
drive capacity is what was advertised and that was before the low level
format - what we used to call the hardware format. Then you put the
filesystem on top of that and lost even more capacity. Today you put
microsoft products on top of that and lose all of your capacity...

Since we went from MFM to IDE, nobody low-level formats anymore. Now

This is incorrect. All drives must be low-level formatted, the IDE
drives are now formatted at the factory. SCSI drives can be low-level
formatted in the field, and often are to change the sector size
(for mainframe systems) or other media characteristics .

The low level formatting divides a track into multiple sectors. There is
some capacity loss in each track as a result of this (inter-sector gaps).

High-level formatting (e.g. DOS Format command) places a filesystem on
the media (to store directories, free space lists and file metadata)
further reducing the available capacity.

Disk space is allocated to files in fixed size quantities, from 512 to
8192 bytes per chunk depending on the OS and filesystem. A lot of
100 byte files will waste 412 bytes per file (so you could realize
perhaps only 20% of your stated drive capacity before "filling it up").

Stated drive capacities are best considered approximate.

scott

In article ,
Silvan wrote:
Brett A. Thomas wrote:

When hard drive manufacturers first started selling hard drives, they
"rounded down," and advertised drive capacities as being on the 10^x

Yes, thank you. You're right. I'm right.

I seem to recall that the old MFM and RLL drives actually delivered the
advertised capacity. Am I dreaming that? It was a long time ago. The
largest one of those I ever laid hands on was 80 megabytes, and I think it
would have actually been 80 megabytes if all the heads had been
working.

NO, you are _not_ dreaming it. A ST-225, commonly referred to as a "20 mb
drive", had a _formatted_ capacity in excess of 21 million bytes. "Usable"
space, after a filesystem was laid down, was a fair bit lower.

Robert Bonomi wrote:
NO, you are _not_ dreaming it. A ST-225, commonly referred to as a "20 mb
drive", had a _formatted_ capacity in excess of 21 million bytes. "Usable"
space, after a filesystem was laid down, was a fair bit lower.

That was an MFM drive. Believe it or not, Seagate still has a tech
reference page up on it:

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...mfm/st225.html

Assuming they haven't retroactively changed their literature to
correspond to their current (wrong) numbering scheme, here're their
quoted numbers on it:

25.6 MB UNFORMATTED CAPACITY
21.4 MB FORMATTED CAPACITY (17 SECTORS)

But, let's remember, *terminology* has changed since then. Back then,
"unformatted" meant "not-low-level-formatted." "Formatted" meant
"low-level-formatted but without a filesystem on it." Nowadays, your
IDE drive comes low-level formatted, so if you want an apples-to-apples
comparison, you want to look at today's "new-in-box unformatted" hard
drive capacity versus yesterday's "[low-level] formatted [without a
filesystem]."

In that page, they state it had 41,820 sectors per drive. Assuming it
followed the standard of 512 byter per sector, that'd be 21,411,840
bytes, or 20.42 (real) MB. So they're quoting "21.4 MB" as the
capacity, but we can clearly see that's actually only 20.42 *real* MB.

So, sorry, guys, you're engaging in that classic pastime of remembering
the past as better than it was. They started lying about hard drive
sizes a *long* time ago, it was just harder to tell with the unformatted
vs. formatted confusion. Also, when you put a filesystem on it, you
inevitably lose some space. Since they were quoting 21.4MB but you were
only getting 20.42 MB, but you didn't see that until FAT had eaten
another chunk, so it wasn't real obvious that you were losing that much.

Anyway, maybe the reason it was "commonly referred to as a '20 mb
drive'" is because it *was* a 20 MB drive.

-BAT

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 09:38:29 -0800, "Brett A. Thomas"
wrote:


So, sorry, guys, you're engaging in that classic pastime of remembering
the past as better than it was. They started lying about hard drive
sizes a *long* time ago, it was just harder to tell with the unformatted
vs. formatted confusion.

We were dealing with variations in capacity data more than 20 years
ago. They are largely the artifact of "generic" drives, drives that
can be used with various systems, and thus potentially formatting
in unpredictable ways. In the good old days of proprietary systems,
you could buy drives that had accurate specifications.

In article ,
Brett A. Thomas wrote:
Robert Bonomi wrote:
NO, you are _not_ dreaming it. A ST-225, commonly referred to as a "20 mb
drive", had a _formatted_ capacity in excess of 21 million bytes. "Usable"
space, after a filesystem was laid down, was a fair bit lower.

That was an MFM drive. Believe it or not, Seagate still has a tech
reference page up on it:

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...mfm/st225.html

Assuming they haven't retroactively changed their literature to
correspond to their current (wrong) numbering scheme,

Your assumption *IS* in error. grin

The early datasheets -- like the paper one I have in my files -- listed
numbers 'to the byte', not the 'approximations' cited below.

here're their
quoted numbers on it:

25.6 MB UNFORMATTED CAPACITY
21.4 MB FORMATTED CAPACITY (17 SECTORS)

But, let's remember, *terminology* has changed since then. Back then,
"unformatted" meant "not-low-level-formatted." "Formatted" meant
"low-level-formatted but without a filesystem on it." Nowadays, your
IDE drive comes low-level formatted, so if you want an apples-to-apples
comparison, you want to look at today's "new-in-box unformatted" hard
drive capacity versus yesterday's "[low-level] formatted [without a
filesystem]."

In that page, they state it had 41,820 sectors per drive. Assuming it
followed the standard of 512 byter per sector, that'd be 21,411,840
bytes, or 20.42 (real) MB. So they're quoting "21.4 MB" as the
capacity, but we can clearly see that's actually only 20.42 *real* MB.

Yup. your assumptions, and numeric derivations are accurate. That is
precisely why it *was* known as, and *sold* as, a "20 mb drive".

So, sorry, guys, you're engaging in that classic pastime of remembering
the past as better than it was. They started lying about hard drive
sizes a *long* time ago, it was just harder to tell with the unformatted
vs. formatted confusion. Also, when you put a filesystem on it, you
inevitably lose some space. Since they were quoting 21.4MB but you were
only getting 20.42 MB, but you didn't see that until FAT had eaten
another chunk, so it wasn't real obvious that you were losing that much.

Bullsh*t. there were *MANY* 'readily available' utilities -- including the
formatter that was BUILT-IN in the HD BIOS chip -- that reported the 'raw'
formatted capacity in actual bytes. And short-hand forms using 1024*1024
multiples.1G

Anyway, maybe the reason it was "commonly referred to as a '20 mb
drive'" is because it *was* a 20 MB drive.

No ****, Sherlock. It _was_ the standard 'way back then' to describe disk-
drive capacity in units of 1024*1024 bytes.

Then the marketing guys got into the act, and perceived an advantage to
rating disks in 'millions of bytes', when the competition was sizing in
'1024*1024' bytes. With disks in the 10e8, and above, capacity range, the
'paper difference' was enough to be a 'marketable difference'.

It did make apples-to-apples comparasions *difficult*. What was worse, the
same manufacturer would use different measurement styles on different lines
of drives.

This was particularly comical, when it was the _same_ HDA assembly, just with
a different controller card on the drive.

Until you slapped that puppy on an RLL controller and made it a 30 MB drive
(give or take a few kB).

Of course, if you were a gambling person, you'd then doublespace the drive
for 60 MB (or so) per ST-225.

Like it so nice? Do it twice!

And ... if you were REALLY LUCKY (as I was ), you replaced the pair of
ST-225s on said RLL controller with doublespace installed (120 MB) JUST
before it died. Died is defined as you just ran the last QIC tape and when
you rebooted ... nothing happened. Load the new drive with DOS and the tape
utilities, restore, and away we go ... back in business.

Woodworking is mild in comparision.

Regards,

Rick



Anyway, maybe the reason it was "commonly referred to as a '20 mb
drive'" is because it *was* a 20 MB drive.

-BAT

"Rick" wrote in message

Of course, if you were a gambling person, you'd then doublespace the drive
for 60 MB (or so) per ST-225.


Damn, how soon we forget. Your use of the word "Doublespace" suddenly
brought back a flood of memories of words/terms like "Stacker".
"DriveSpace", and "CVF" that I guess had slipped into my subconscious. Who
was it sued MSFT for stealing (what else is new) their compression
algorithm, Stac Electronics, or something like that? IIRC, that was a BIG
deal when DOS 6.0 came out.

Time really flies ...

--
www.e-woodshop.net
Last update: 11/06/04

Swingman wrote:
Damn, how soon we forget. Your use of the word "Doublespace" suddenly
brought back a flood of memories of words/terms like "Stacker".
"DriveSpace", and "CVF" that I guess had slipped into my subconscious. Who
was it sued MSFT for stealing (what else is new) their compression
algorithm, Stac Electronics, or something like that? IIRC, that was a BIG
deal when DOS 6.0 came out.

I remember I had an acquaintance back then who excitedly told me, one
day, "I'm beta testing for Stacker!" I said, "Yeah, you do that. Good
luck with that..."

"Swingman" wrote in message
...
"Rick" wrote in message

Of course, if you were a gambling person, you'd then doublespace the
drive
for 60 MB (or so) per ST-225.


Damn, how soon we forget. Your use of the word "Doublespace" suddenly
brought back a flood of memories of words/terms like "Stacker".
"DriveSpace", and "CVF" that I guess had slipped into my subconscious. Who
was it sued MSFT for stealing (what else is new) their compression
algorithm, Stac Electronics, or something like that? IIRC, that was a BIG
deal when DOS 6.0 came out.

It was Stac.

todd

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:32:21 -0800, Brett A. Thomas wrote:

I remember I had an acquaintance back then who excitedly told me, one
day, "I'm beta testing for Stacker!" I said, "Yeah, you do that. Good
luck with that..."

My standard comment in such situations has been, for rather a long
time now, "Yeah, 'cuz what could _possibly_ go wrong?".

Rick wrote:

Until you slapped that puppy on an RLL controller and made it a 30 MB
drive (give or take a few kB).

32 MB IIRC.

I saw one of those things the other day. What do you bet half the people,
maybe even 75% or even 90% of the people who have home computers today have
no clue what a "full sized card" is?

I ran into that with someone in some context or other. I don't remember the
surrounding details, but his definition of a "full sized card" was one
where the PCB came all the way to the end of the edge connector.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/

On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 17:09:44 -0500, Silvan
wrote:

Rick wrote:

Until you slapped that puppy on an RLL controller and made it a 30 MB
drive (give or take a few kB).

32 MB IIRC.

I saw one of those things the other day. What do you bet half the people,
maybe even 75% or even 90% of the people who have home computers today have
no clue what a "full sized card" is?

I ran into that with someone in some context or other. I don't remember the
surrounding details, but his definition of a "full sized card" was one
where the PCB came all the way to the end of the edge connector.

it's been a while since I've had a card that came to the "front" of
the case and had to be supported there. last one was a sound card,
IIRC...

Snip ......
I saw one of those things the other day. What do you bet half the people,
maybe even 75% or even 90% of the people who have home computers today
have
no clue what a "full sized card" is?

I ran into that with someone in some context or other. I don't remember
the
surrounding details, but his definition of a "full sized card" was one
where the PCB came all the way to the end of the edge connector.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/

There ... I'll irritate the other 50% this time. Probably shouldn't get
started on the walk down "memory" lane (pun intended). I remember when ALL
cards were full-length. I read a piece about a computer museum on
aliceandbill.com and blathered on about all the ones they missed ... I don't
need to do that again this week.

Perhaps when this embedded controller programming job finishes up, I'll make
some sawdust. After I clear the electronics crap out of the shop!

Regards,

Rick

BTW, bought a USB "thumb drive" yesterday ... 128 MB ... 'bout as big as the
old drive _connector_ ... capacity is greater than what my first FOUR
computers combined had ... for $16.00.