[conspire] output from gparted doesn't explain missing GiBs

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Thu Apr 1 17:45:48 PDT 2010


Also, I wrote:

> Also, Seagate and the others were able to justify their nomenclature by
> reference to official Systeme Internationale (SI) definitions of units
> applied in an achingly precise and context-blind manner:  Within the
> metric system proper, "tera" officially means 10^9, not 2^30.  
                                                ^^^^

10^12 -- but you knew what I meant, I suspect.

> The official Seagate specs on your drive -- that's model
> ST910004FAA2E1-RK, right? -- are annoyingly vague:  They say only that
> it's a "1 TB" capacity drive, but if you _were_ able to get figures on
> sectors per track, heads, tracks per head, and bytes per sector and do
> the math, I'm guessing you'd find that it's just over 10^9 bytes, which
> is what what Seagate calls a terabyte.                ^^^^

Again, 10^12.


A bit of bonus trivia, as long as I'm writing:

Those of us who converse with English-speakers from elsewhere need to 
be careful about yet another USA-versus-everyone-else usage difference:
"billion", "trillion", etc. 

In the UK and most other countries, a billion is a million million
(10^12), a trillion is a million million million (10^18), etc.

In the USA, a billion is a _thousand_ million (10^9).  A trillion is a 
_thousand thousand_ million (10^12).






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