The Great Capacity Swindle

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I have just bought a 320Gig HD to put inside my MBP... wow... Once formatted it's about 298gig... hello where did my 20gig go!!! Hehehe, I'm not actually bothered since Hard drives for what ever reason have always been measured in decimal bytes by manufacturers. I don't care since they are all sold like that... but what the hell... that's a lot of space inside a laptop!!!  :-)

The problem we face now, is that if we wanted to move the more helpful Binary system, ALL manufacturers would have to do it together. Nothing would be worse or more confusing than manufacturers stating different capacities for the same size drive.

What we might see is a change with SSDs... since these are built using Chips and therefore inherently measured in powers of 2... we might expect to see a shift to binary sizes over decimal ones.

I notice that my old 540Mb HD in my A1200 is about the same size as my 512Mb Compact flash...

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zipper wrote:

I remember formatting the amiga disks in a special matter it would give capacity of 1MB...
I don't remember what i used to format the disks in that matter though....

diskspare.device, upto 984 kB, is one contender.

If you rewrote the trackdisk.device to use 8B/10B encoding instead of MFM... then you could proably incraese a standard floppy capacity to 1.4Megs...

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Zac67 wrote:

koaftder wrote:
Everybody, except for hard drive manufacturers, use base 2 to indicate capacity.

No - everybody, except for memory manfacturers, uses base 10 to indicate capacity.

It does make sense, though, to use base 2 to measure the capacity of a binary data storage medium... think you not?

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Zac67 wrote:
Well, it's digital, but its addressing is nothing on any binary basis. Rather, the size of a mass storage device depends solely on manufacturing, engineering and marketing decisions, thus entirely arbitrary.

Actually, I was of the binary fraction some years ago, but as soon as you work with stuff not entirely computer related, you start thinking about the traditional 1024 units - and find there's very little reason for them.

Well as a factor 1024 is rather useful for quickly scaling on a binary computer since it only requires a shift.

But the basic unit of data is the (8bit) byte, which maybe an unfortunate accident of history... but it does mean that the conventions put it place to conveniently use that unit are here to stay...

As some who probably speaks German fluently, I would expect you to accept the use of seemingly arbitrary conventions that exist for no other reason than historic :-)

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Zac67 wrote:
:lol: - granted.

Du glaubst mir, ich bin sehr neidisch... (oder vielleicht, Du musst mir glauben, ich bin sehr neidisch. ) For some odd reason I keep forgetting in inflect masculine nouns in the accusative case at the moment... it's very frustrating, as I notice the mistake as soon as I make it... And so do all my German friends :getmad:

I've come to somewhat dislike the binary units (or rather the grey zone between the binary and the decimal kilos) and have decided to stick with the SI compatible 1000 where more logical - obviously it's still your own choice today, but imho you shouldn't object to people using the slightly more modern version when it seems fit (and makes your products look larger).

Indeed, I don't have a problem either way... Just as long as I know which is used :-)

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Zac67 wrote:

bloodline wrote:

Du glaubst mir, ich bin sehr neidisch... For some odd reason I keep forgetting in inflect masculine nouns in the accusative case at the moment... it's very frustrating, as I notice the mistake as soon as I make it... And so do all my German friends :getmad:

I feel great respect for those taking on this illogical and (at times) cumbersome language - and you're doing quite well. Don't get frustrated, the best way to learn a language is by using it.  ;-)

Danke, das ist sehr nett von dir! Ich versuche, es ist spaß, aber ziemlich schwer... Und ich bin jetzt betrunken  :-)

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platon42 wrote:

bloodline wrote:

zipper wrote:

I remember formatting the amiga disks in a special matter it would give capacity of 1MB...
I don't remember what i used to format the disks in that matter though....

diskspare.device, upto 984 kB, is one contender.

If you rewrote the trackdisk.device to use 8B/10B encoding instead of MFM... then you could proably incraese a standard floppy capacity to 1.4Megs...

I once (in 1998) wrote a "tbc.device" which used "three bit encoding" for two data bits instead of MFM (two encoded bits for one data bits) and theoretically allowed 16 blocks per track. Using 82 cylinders, you could reach 1312 KB per DD disk.

Oh, that sounds cool... imagine if you had released that in 1990 :-)

 Unfortunately, I only managed to get the encoding stable for the first 40 cylinders -- probably due to precompensation after this mark, the reading of the data was not stable. I gave up the project as floppies were becoming more and more obsolete at that time anyway.

Would precompensation really affect this? I would suggest that perhaps it was more likely that you might have made a calculation error that only showed up when the numbers got big enough. Not wishing to cast aspersions upon your code or abilities :-)

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HopperJF wrote:
Believe it or not it was as recently as 1997 that the most blank floppy disks were sold, the following year being overtaken by CD-Rs

Sounds about right... I was still buying floppies up to 2000... though not after... now I don't have a modern computer with a floppy drive... (/me leers at his old Althon64 3200 in the corner :-D).

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Zac67 wrote:
I understand you used no write precompensation at all? Then that's probably the cause. Local velocity of the medium increases constantly inward - on track 40 you have a ~35% higher speed, rising to nearly double speed on track 80. I'd guess even three different precomp zones would be necessary. Nice project though. ;-)

Ahhh, right! I assumed that either Paula or the drive electronics itself would have handled the Precompensation... but Paula is very simple... so I guess everything has to be done in software... Makes you glad that Floppies have gone really! :-)