Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes

• onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Hard drive manufacturers know exactly what they’re doing. It’s like selling something that’s 1 fluid ounce, but not saying “this is an imperial fluid ounce” --> ~2ml less than what a US food labeling ounce is. Sell 1k, 1M, 2G fluid ounces and you’re delivering less liquid than people would expect.

  The same goes for any other unit that can be ambiguous. See the imperial vs US measurement systems.

  Your entire argument seems to be based on kilo = 1000, kibi = 1024, which is technically correct (inb4 “best kind of correct”), but when you format a 256GB drive and find out that you don’t actually have 256GB available (even including filesystem headers etc.) it benefits the manufacturer.

  You probably don’t work for a HD manufacturer, which is why I’m jokingly calling you a shill.

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  • Phrodo_00@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    when you format a 256GB drive and find out that you don’t actually have 256GB

    Most of the time you have at least 256GB. It’s just you 256GB=238.4GiB, and windows reports GiB but calls them GB. You wouldn’t have that problem in Mac OS that counts GB properly, or gnome that counts GiB and calls them GiB.

    (This is ignoring the few MB that takes to format a drive, but that’s also space on the disk and you’re the one choosing to partition and format the drive. If you dumped a file straight into the drive you’d get that back, but it would be kind of inconvenient)

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  • wischi@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So why don’t they just label drives in Terabit instead of terabyte. The number would be even bigger. Why don’t Europeans also use Fahrenheit, with the bigger numbers the temperature for sure would instantly feel warmer 🤣

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    • meekah@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      there is nothing intrinsically base 2 about hard drives

      did you miss the part where those devices store binary data?

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      • wischi@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Binary prefixes (the ones with 1024 conversations) are used to simplify numbers that are exact powers of two - for example RAM and similar types of memory. Hard drive sizes are never exact powers of two. Disk storing bits don’t have anything to do with the size of the disk.

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    • wewbull@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      there is nothing intrinsically base 2 about hard drives

      Yes there is. The addressing protocol. Sectors are 512 (2⁹) bytes, and there’s an integer number of them on a drive.

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      • wischi@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That’s true but the entire disk size is not an exact power of two that’s why binary prefixes (1024 conversation) don’t have any benefit whatsoever when it comes to hard drives. With memory it’s a bit different because other than with storage devices RAM size is always exactly a power of two.

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  • wikibot@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

    Both the British imperial measurement system and United States customary systems of measurement derive from earlier English unit systems used prior to 1824 that were the result of a combination of the local Anglo-Saxon units inherited from Germanic tribes and Roman units. Having this shared heritage, the two systems are quite similar, but there are differences. The US customary system is based on English systems of the 18th century, while the imperial system was defined in 1824, almost a half-century after American independence.

    ^article^ ^|^ ^about^

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