this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Not really? They say kilo, mega, giga, tera, but they're not actually 1000s of each other... they're 1024 of each other.
No, the powers of 1024 are called "Kibibyte (KiB)", " Mebibyte (MiB) and "Gibibyte (GiB)" (those are called "binary prefixes"). Gigabyte is 1000^3. This is why hard drive manufacturers use Gb instead of Gib, because it lets them sell a smaller drive with the same number before the prefix (2 TB < 2 TiB).
Prior to 1998, it was ambiguous, and some usages of the metric prefixes to denote 1024^n persist to this day (hello Windows). But nowadays any usage of 1024^n should absolutely use the binary prefixes.
The difference between "should" and "do". Windows is a huge market share, you can't act like they're some weird exception.
I mean sure, it's true there's still ambiguous usage. But that doesn't change the fact that hard drive manufacturer use the powers of 1000, which is what the previous comment was about.
As SI prefixes, they’re all multiples of ten, technically speaking. So referring to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte is incorrect, it’s 1.024 kilobytes or 1 kibibyte. Microsoft deciding to ignore industry and international standards is the reason for the confusion.
But either way, hard drive manufacturers will sell a 1TB drive, and Windows will see that as a 935GB drive - that’s basically the difference between 2^40 bytes vs. 10^12 bytes