Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Radical and foolish hardware experiments... HELP!
Message-ID: <1682@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 21 Nov 89 15:14:09 GMT
References: <1989Nov19.125747.461@contact.uucp> <24304@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Distribution: usa
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 16

In article <24304@cup.portal.com> compata@cup.portal.com (David H Close) writes:

| The Maxtor (probably the 1085) is 85 MB _unformatted_, only about 71 (or 72)
| formatted.  Why can't there be some truth in disk drive advertising?

  It's not a question of truth, just incomplete information. I realize
that MS-DOS is very important to some people, but the common controller
chips support sector sizes other than 512, and therefore some users are
interested in knowing the unformatted capacity. The typical ST506 drive
will give 17 sectors at 512 bytes, and 9 at 1024. For 8 heads and 1024
cylinders that's another 4MB more or less.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon