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Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes

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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  - meekah@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    sure, but one of the intrinsic properties of binary data is that it is in binary sized chunks. you won’t find a hard drive that stores 1000 bits of data per chunk.
    
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    abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The “chunk” is often 32,768 bits these days and it never matches the actual size of the drive.
    
    A 120 GB drive might actually be closer to 180 GB when it’s brand new (if it’s a good drive - cheap ones might be more like 130 GB)… and will get smaller as the drive wears out with normal use. I once had a HDD go from 500 GB down to about 50 GB before I stopped using it - it was a work computer and only used for email so 50 GB was when it actually started running out of space.
    
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    wischi@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Look up the exact number of bytes and then explain to me what the benefits are of using 1024 conversations instead of 1000 for a hard drive?
    
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  - gens@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    SSDs are.
    
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    wischi@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not even SSDs are. Do you have an SSD? You should lookup the exact drive size in bytes, it’s very likely not an exact power of two.
    
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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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