Clarify between decimal bytes and binary bytes

Kevin D Butt kdbutt at us.ibm.com
Wed Jul 7 11:45:35 PDT 2010


Formatted message: <a href="http://www.t10.org/cgi-bin/ac.pl?t=r&f=r1007075_f.htm">HTML-formatted message</a>

Rob,
Thanks.  I thought Ralph and I had discussed this in the past, but I 
couldn't find it in SPC-4.
Thanks,
Kevin D. Butt
SCSI & Fibre Channel Architect, Tape Firmware
MS 6TYA, 9000 S. Rita Rd., Tucson, AZ 85744
Tel: 520-799-5280
Fax: 520-799-2723 (T/L:321)
Email address: kdbutt at us.ibm.com
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/storage/ 
From:
"Elliott, Robert (Server Storage)" <Elliott at hp.com>
To:
Kevin D Butt/Tucson/IBM at IBMUS, "t10 at t10.org" <t10 at t10.org>
Date:
07/07/2010 11:07 AM
Subject:
RE: Clarify between decimal bytes and binary bytes
Bob Snively championed that back in 2000 during SPC-2 letter ballot. The 
conflicting units actually don't appear very often in the T10 standards.
See:
* SPC-4 revision 25 section 3.6.4
* SES-3 revision 2 section 7.3.11 table 95
SBC-3 revision 22 has no remaining uses of binary OR decimal prefixes, so 
no longer references IEC 60027.
---
Rob Elliott    HP ISS Platform Technology - Server Storage
From: owner-t10 at t10.org [mailto:owner-t10 at t10.org] On Behalf Of Kevin D 
Butt
Sent: Wednesday, 07 July, 2010 11:37 AM
To: t10 at t10.org
Subject: Clarify between decimal bytes and binary bytes
I believe that the time has come to clear up confusion in the industry 
about the units used in T10 standards.	There should be a clause added in 
each of the standards describing the difference between decimal bytes 
(e.g., MB = 10^6) and binary bytes (e.g., MiB = 2^20).	There has been 
this definition in IEC for since Dec 1998. 
References: 
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix 
I hesitate to bring in a solo proposal to modify SSC-4 or even SPC-4 when 
this issue should apply to all standards. 
Does anybody disagree that T10 should clarify the units being used in our 
standards? 
What is the preferred manner in which we should proceed to make sure this 
clarification is added to each standard? 
Thanks, 
Kevin D. Butt
SCSI & Fibre Channel Architect, Tape Firmware
MS 6TYA, 9000 S. Rita Rd., Tucson, AZ 85744
Tel: 520-799-5280
Fax: 520-799-2723 (T/L:321)
Email address: kdbutt at us.ibm.com
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/storage/ 



More information about the T10 mailing list