Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
meekah@lemmy.world 6 months agothere is nothing intrinsically base 2 about hard drives
did you miss the part where those devices store binary data?
Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
meekah@lemmy.world 6 months agothere is nothing intrinsically base 2 about hard drives
did you miss the part where those devices store binary data?
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.
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.
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.
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?
gens@programming.dev 5 months ago
SSDs are.
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.
gens@programming.dev 5 months ago
Checked and true. 500107862016 bytes.
Still, ssds are made of n^2 chips.