IDE drive question: Conner vs. Seagate

[Dick Dunn]

martin at mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes about two possible drives:
> 	- Conner CP320AF (211MB, 16ms)
> 	- Seagate ST1239A (210MB, 15ms)

I believe that should be the Conner CP3204F.  ("4", not "A")

You need to be careful about what manufacturers mean when they say "MB".
Unfortunately, some of them think a "megabyte" is 1,000,000 bytes.  Since
normal usage in the industry works in powers of 2, most of us take a
kilobyte to be 2^10 and a megabyte to be a kilo-kilobyte, or 2^20, which is
1,048,576.  (OK, enough belaboring of obvious basic stuff.:-)  Playing the
marketing game of 1,000,000 to the megabyte gives a quick 5% increase in
apparent capacity--not a lot, but it might influence a purchasing
decision.

Conner does this.  I don't know if Seagate does; you ought to check.  The
actual size of the Conner CP3204F is 8 surfaces, 1366 tracks, 38 usable
sectors.  That's 415264 sectors or 202.8 Mb, although Conner's spec sheet
calls the drive's formatted capacity 212.6 Mb.  Anyone have configuration
of the Seagate drive?

I stumbled across this when I was comparing specs on Conner's "84 Mb" drive
(spec'ed as 84.3 Mb) against Maxtor's "80 Mb" drive.  As it turns out,
the Conner drive's real capacity is 80.4 Mb; the Maxtor's is 81.4 Mb!
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd at ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Mr. Natural says, "Use the right tool for the job."