this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Dude, a "1.44MB" floppy disk was 1.38MiB once formatted (1,474,560 B raw). It's been going on for eternity.

It's inconsistent across time though. 700MB on a CD-R was MiB, but a 4.7GB DVD was not.

RAM has always, without exception, been reported in 1024 B per KB. Inversely, network bandwidth has been 1000 B per KB for every application since the dialup days (and prior).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

One thing to point out, The floppy thing isn't due to formatting, the units themselves were screwed up: It's not 1.44 million bytes or 1.44 MiB regardless of formatting - they are 1440 kiB! (Which produces the raw size you gave) which is about 1.406 MiB unformatted.

The reason is because they were doubled from 720 kiB disks*, and the largest standard 5¼ inch disks ("1.2 MB") were doubled from 600 kiB*. I guess it seemed easier or less confusing to the users then double 600k becoming 1.17M.

(* Those smaller sizes were themselves already doubled from earlier sizes. The "1.44 MB" ones are "Double sided double density")