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Computer Makers Sued Over Hard Drive Size
FPCat writes "Finally, some one is doing something about one of my pet peeves. It seems a group of people are suing Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, and others for misleading consumers about hard disk sizes. About time someone spoke up and said '1000 MB != 1 GB'" It's not much of a mystery to anyone who's up on industry practices, but it's similar to the way graphic displays are sized, cereal boxes are filled, and so on. Andy Rooney could have a field day with this one.
In SI units (which most civilised counties use) M means mega which is defined as 10^6, i.e. 1000000 , it is only the computer industry that deems K (1000) to equal 1024 which it does not, then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024. This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers, as the borrowing of those from SI is clearly misleading.
It's also worth noting that EXT2 and some other UNIX-based filesystems reserve a certain percent of the space; this makes their available capacity smaller for non-root users.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
A lot of people here have claimed that the *bi prefixes are SI standards. They aren't. They're IEC standards.
Now, if you'll forgive me, I'll get back to looking at my 19.96-inch monitor and spinning my 73.47-times-2^10-times-2^10-times-8-bit (post-formatted capacity, using a single ext3 partition, your results may vary, not valid in Utah) hard-disk drive.
Most of the boxes have fine print them already that says "1 megabyte is 1 million bytes" or something similar. At least the ones that I've seen.
No! CD-R uses binary prefixes and DVD-R uses decimal prefixes. Actually, in reality, both CD-R and DVD-R capacity labels are inaccurate under either the binary or the decimal interpretation, but you have to really be splitting hairs to notice.
The exact expected capacity of normal sized CD-Rs (not counting overburning, yadda yadda) is as follows:
- For 74 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 74*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 681984000 bytes, or 650.390625 binary MiB (exactly, no roundoff error).
- For 80 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 80*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 737280000 bytes, or 703.125 binary MiB (again, this figure is exact, not rounded off).
For DVD+/-R[W] media, the exact capacity is 4697620480 bytes, or just shy of 4.7 decimal GB. The capacity of a DVD-R is certainly nowhere near 4.7 binary GB.No! They are not even close to being in the same galaxy as "more correct". Within the context of the computer world,
- 1K = 1024 or 2^10
- 1M = 1048576 or 2^20
- 1G = 1073741824 or 2^30
- 1T = 1099511627776 or 2^40
In case you hadn't noticed, hard drives are typically used and marketed within the context of the "computer world". Had I purchased a hard drive to use as part of a support for holding up my car or as part of a wind chime or as a hat, I would expect the magnitude prefix to reflect the SI prefixes (1G = 10^9).However, since I, like most, purchased a hard drive to use within a computer, I expect the magnitude prefixes to accurately reflect the context of use, not some marketing scheme.
If VISTA is the answer, you didn't understand the question
This is why you should always make your logical raid volumes 1% smaller (approximately)
There is abut 7% difference between 2^30 and 10^9. I have seen disks being exactly 80*10^9 bytes, I believe they were sold as 80GB disks. If you find an 80GB disk which is really 80GB, you will have to leave 7% unused, that is 5.5GB waste.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
- 1 k = 1e3
- 1 M = 1e6
- 1 G = 1e9
- 1 T = 1e12
But:- 1 KiB = 1024
- 1 MiB = 1024^2
- 1 GiB = 1024^3
- 1 TiB = 1024^4
This was standardized years ago and is valid for all people*, not only engineers on one side or computer geeks on the other.* = all people does not include citizens of the United States, because the U.S. have not yet introduced the internationally standardized metric system