Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago“Kilo” means 1000 under the official International System of Units.
With some computer hardware, it’s more convenient to use 1024 for a kilobyte and in the early days nobody really cared that it was slightly wrong.
These days, people do care and the correct term for 1024 is “Kibi” (kilo-binary). For example Kibibyte. There’s also Gibi, Tebi, Exbi, etc.
It’s mostly RAM that uses 1024. The internet, hard drives, etc, usually use 1000 and they always have.
Weird numbering system? Things are still stored in blocks of 8 bits at the end, it doesn’t matter.
When it gets down to what matter on hard drives, every byte still uses 8 bits, and all other numbers for people actually working with computer science that matter are multiples of 8, not 10.
And because all internal systems use base 8, base 10 is “slower” (not that it matters any longer.
Hyperreality@kbin.social 8 months ago
AFAIK windows also uses KB/MB/GB to refer to powers of 2 when calculating disk space. Linux does too. Apparently OSX uses the KB=1000 definition.
It may be outdated, but it's still incredibly common for people to use KB/MB/GB to refer to powers of 2 in computing. Best not to assume KB is always 1000.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Windows and Mac both use KB = 1000. With Linux I think it depends on the distro.
You’re thinking of very old versions of Windows… old versions of MacOS were also 1024.
It’s honestly irrelevant anyway - if you want to actually know how much space a file is using on disk, you should look up how many pages / sectors are being used.
A page (on an SSD) or sector (on a HDD) is 32768 bits on most modern drives. They can’t store a file smaller than that and all of your files take up a multiple of that. A lot of modern filesystems quietly use zip compression though. Also they have snapshots and files that exist in multiple locations other shit going on which will really mess with your actual real storage usage.
I’m not going to run
du -h /on my laptop, because it’d take forever, but I’m pretty sure it would be a number significantly larger than my actual disk.