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Hard Drive Capacity Confusion, Lucidly Explained
mrklin writes "James Wiebe of wiebetech.com has written a clear example of how hard drive capacity is calculated (PDF file) by hard drive manufacturers (base 10) and OS (base 2). He failed to name how the capacity should be described, though."
With storage prices falling through the floor, does it matter to anyone except whiny nerds whether the byte counts are done in base 10 or base 2?
In the words of William Shatner, "Get a life!"
This one will hold 30 days of Porn
Now, this one here will hold 45 days of Porn
Break it down to something Everyone understands
The real units joke is starting to get old...
In the grand scheme of things, drive capacity issues seem to revolve around lawyers more than consumers.
I wish that the major manufacturers would stop putting 1 BIG drive in the system, and put 2 normal sized ones in and MIRRORED.
As somebody who gets blasted by customers when they failed to do their backup, an out of the box, pre mirrored system would be far better for the consumer than properly labelling those lost 200 MB.
Sorry, that's my partially related rant for this evening.
My mom says I'm cool.
This is a real easy concept that anyone taken algebra can figure out. After looking in the article, there is also more information about the history of the debate, but the summary doesn't mention that.
Monitor sizes? I love my 19" (18" viewable) monitor!
--Slashdot readers delight in generalizing the behavior of other Slashdot readers.
Why are we seeing another article on this very issue?
Everyone understands HD manufacture's measuring systems. Failing that, we could just have billy fix up windows to overstate drive capacity to all windows users and they would never know any better.
No more Micro$oft bashing from me. Its like bashing at the special olympics.
1GB + 73,741,824 bytes = 1GB
Rank Presidents by th
If I can fit 50 hours more pr0n in that space, it will be worth the effort.
And really, this isn't peanuts we're talking about here. A few gigs here, a few gigs there, and pretty soon you're talking about real bytes.
Hell, just 5 years ago the biggest hard drives were smaller than this "lost space."
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Clearly explains that the difference is only in units and nobody is trying to defraud anybody. The users are getting what they pay for.
But, one question is if there are bad sectors on the disk, would the space lost be shown by the OS?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Our computers are binary, so the hard drives that we put in them should be measured using the binary (Base-2) representation.
Build me a microprocessor containing transistors that switch between 10 different voltage levels before you continue with your Base-10 tomfoolery.
Share Files To Large To E-mail
PDF can be annoying
Don't worry. NAS for the home will help.
As far as ordinary users (i.e. anyone who doesn't have to deal with TLBs, memory pages, disk sectors and the like) are concerned, there's really no reason left to use binary units; 2^9 bytes per sector, 8 sectors per filesystem block, etc. are all low-level conveniences that the user shouldn't have to even notice. Though I personally am too used to the binary units to switch easily, the vast majority of users probably wouldn't even notice the difference, aside from their computers finally reporting the right size for their hard disks. Granted, overcoming the huge momentum for binary units will be difficult, but one could always consider it practice for getting the USA to accept metric.
I think it's a little odd that he claimed that Hard drive makers have "Always" done this. I very specifically remember advertisements for hard drives being "One Billion Bytes" (with like a 14 point small print letting us know that it was indeed 1000000000 bytes). After that "billion bytes" became gigabytes and the font became smaller.
I've also heard that for some drive makers "gigabyte" means 1^20*10^3 (i.e. one thousand megabytes) and things like that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is not a matter of base-10 vs base-2... a base-10 number is written as "2875" for example. A base-2 number is written as "10100110". A base-16 number is written as "8A3F0"...
This is a matter of UNITS used - like inches vs. feet, or in this case GiB vs GB.
Geez, get the terminiology right...
The examples in the links given don't go far enough. I know the difference between base 10 and base 2, but how do you pronounce the individual digits in binary? For example, I know that '11' in base 10 is pronounced eleven and quantifies three in base two. But 'three' is a base 10 word. It doesn't symbolize the way it's written in base 2. Reading out the digits as singular ones and zeros doesn't quantify the actual value either. So is there a syntax to speaking in binary? How do you verbally count in binary? I hate to seen what happens when we get to base-n numbering systems.
Someone hates these cans.
describe the size in terms of number of songs. (of course, /. regulars will describe in terms of how much porn)
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Ive noticed that some companies tend to go a little over the hard drive specified size. Most notably with maxtor. My 160GB and 200GB hard drives are actually 163.9GB and 203.9GB. On the other hand Ive found that Western digital seems to have drives slightly smaller than their advertized capacity (59.8GB for a 60GB drive and 79.97GB for an 80GB drive)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
"For which one do I use da brooom, guys?"
About two years ago there was a debate about this. Can't remember the details of that debate. Maybe it was when those "mebibytes" were introduced. I still say now what I said then.
I think there should be "short megabytes" and "long megabytes", and the same for gigabytes. Like this:
Then all we need is to get hard drive manufacturers and OS vendors to state whether they are using short or long tons, er, gigabytes.
As to abbreviations, take Donald Knuth's suggestion. Use the capital letter twice to suggest binaryness. 1 MMB = one long megabyte; 1 GGB = one long gigabyte. I like this much better than the now-standardized MiB men-in-black abbreviation for long megabytes (which are still not called long megabytes in the standard, they are called mebibytes, which sounds silly and no one uses it).
Who's with me?
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
First an article about the Scroll-lock key and now this? Have the editors decided we are morons now or something?
Well, you need some type of news at night...
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Well, he does say this:
And this:
But personally I strongly reject this "kibibytes" attempt at CS revisionist history. Stick with what CS people have been using as measurements for decades, I say, and not submit to what the drive manufacturers want to use for inflated advertising.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It makes sense and is easy to remember.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
To all the people who are complaining about the "loss" of data and how the manufacturers are fleecing the consumer please read the end of the article. The author states:
3.7. Was the consumer ever cheated as a result? Here's the most surprising answer of all -- the consumer always had all the capacity he was promised...
I am over here... now I am back over here!
Remember McDonalds with the old lady burning herself with coffee? She won and McDonald had to become captain obvious with that label on the the coffee cup.
I guess pretty soon the HD boxes and the HDs themselves will have a big warning label too. The difference here is that knowing coffee is hot is common sense (to 99.9% of the people, apparently), and knowing computer is binary, on the other hand is not. Seriously, unless you KNOW about computers and binary, why would you CARE how the big the HD is in binary math?
I should start a new university, where the new major will be: Suing People.
What's so "new" about this? It's been printed on the boxes for YEARS that "MB refers to 1,000,000 bytes" or whatever have you. They need to have this small print on there so they're not falsely advertising or misleading consumers. If you're stupid enough to not read the fine print on the outside of a box you're buying in the store, you're probably also stupid enough to never find that pdf article that shows how the calculations are formed. I fail to see why this made it to the front page on /.
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
10 inches. Back in the old days the carpenters didn't document that a foot=12 inches and obviously since we have 10 fingers a foot must be equal to 10 inches.
Imagine what that means for car manufactures when we measure mpg for fuel efficiency on cars a mile should actually be 880ft shorter then it really is. That's about 16% shorter. Imagine if car companies could claim by the same logic that cars are 16% more fuel efficient then they really are.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
The only relevant issue is the meaning of words like kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte. Wiebe describes how you can arrive at two different answers for drive capacity depending on how you define the word "gigabyte," but does so completely uncritically. For example, he describes the drive manufacturer logic and writes that "the drive's claim of 123.5 GB is verified with this simple mathematical formula." But the issue is what the word "gigabyte" means, and the formula presented sheds no light on the word's conventional usage or etymology. I personally was raised to use these terms to correspond the numbers that are powers of two. Wiebe doesn't give me any point of reference to shed light on whether it's reasonable to use the meanings drive manufacturers do. (Of course I already know the answer, but that's beside the point.)
Wiebe uses some other odd logic, exemplified in point 3.7. He writes that the consumer was never cheated, because a drive advertised as having a capacity of 123.5GB had just that in "decimal based" capacity. This is a bizarre way to characterize the complaints. Consumers who believe they were cheated aren't claiming they didn't get 123.5GB for any definition of the word gigabyte. They're claiming they didn't get 123.5GB by the conventional definition of the word as commonly used in connection with computers. In my view, they're right, although I don't personally get too upset about it.
I think Wikipedia's entry on gigabyte should make this crap appear really stupid. Here's a clip from the entry:
Since most people who buy computers are not in "computer science or computer programming", I would argue the value used by storage manufacturers is perfectly applicable when selling computers in the mainstream.
Sadly, it appears lawsuits rather than education on a minor issue will be used to settle this matter, which will lead to a precedent that will be yet another aggrivation for the computer industry. Damnit, if you're a lay person, it's safe to say that 1,000 Megabytes is roughly 1 Gigabyte.
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"Operating System Overhead uses a negligible amount of drive space. We note that operating system take a portion of drive capacity for use as file tables. A typical drive utilizes 70 MegaBytes for this function, which is not significant on a drive with a capacity of 120GB. (0.07GB out of a total capacity of 120GB)."
Hey Jimmy, assuming you're using FAT32 as your XP filesystem, which uses 73.8 MB of space for every gigabyte, not just 73.8 megs one time, that adds up to roughly 8,856MB of space used for the filesystem. Which on a labeled 123.5 GB drive, leaves you with roughly 115GB of space! Wow! The HD manufacturers were right!
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
I don't know what he's talking about; my Pentium 66 insists that 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,000,000 exactly.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
He failed to name how the capacity should be described, though.
Well, who cares how it should be described?
What we should care about is how most describe it and try to enforce that way in order to avoid confusion. But sure, if you want to be an anarchistic geek, go to a forum screaming that we should use GiB and KiB because blah blah blah... Then watch how many cares and watch the power of a de facto standard.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Is this still "News for Nerds" or "News for Neophytes?"
First we get a story on the "Scroll Lock" key and now this on hard drive capacity.
What next? The difference between dial-up and broadband explained?
Like Library of Congresses
I want my 100 LoC drive.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I would have thought OS overhead (file tables, directory structuers) would have been the deciding factor. I mean, the 3.5" floppy can only get as far as 1.4MB in windows, but I know of other devices that format the exact same disk to get up to 1.6MB of space out of a single floppy. In fact, I remember that a 3.5" floppy drive for the Commodore 64 did exactly that.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I have noticed that an IDE's equivalent SCSI drive have the sizes displayed well. Maybe I didn't have a close-up look at the OS representation, but the suppliers sure display the values differently and the values look quite close to a factor(10000000)/(1024*1024).
!
How many Libraries of Congress does this translate to? Come on people, use standard units!
...he ignores the fact that HD manufacturers are happy using bytes which are 8 bits, all the while flaunting the established convention that MB/GB refers to binary megabytes and binary gigabytes. Why don't they specify the size of their HDs in bits?
I'm asuming the next posted Ask Slashdot will be to explain kbs vs. kB/sec (print screen and scroll lock have already been covered)
I actually think this concept is more confusing and harmful to consumers than the old 1024/1000 problem. With wireless networks going crazy in sales at the Best Buy, I could see people not liking the whole 1Mbps and transfer rates of 'up to 4 MB/s'
Not only is a transfer rate MB/s possibly a MiB/s, but I've noticed USB2.0 uses bandwidth rates and not baud and/or 54Mbps. (Are we allowed to refer to baud anymore?)
Treasure! ... Aarrg.
Yours truly,
Guybrush Threepwood
PS I thought the last few Starwars movies sucked!
Realized... The word is realized...
Because, not only is it introducing a new name for a 'familiar' unit, but it's redefining the old name. You should never redefine the old name.
The example I like to use is imagine the 128 oz. volume 'Gallon' getting renamed to a 'Giballon', while at the same time redefining a 'Gallon' as 100 oz.
So now, when someone asks for a gallon of something, you have to ask "an old gallon, or a new gallon?"
Same thing. if you're talking to someone who uses Mibibytes, and they say their new hard drive is, say, '37.6 Gigabytes', you have to ask "Is that old gigabytes or new gigabytes?"
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It's fairly simple. Computers are base 2 boxes. There are transistors wired in a digital fashion (like a light switch, they can be either on or off). There are no dimmer switches in computers. Each on/off signal is a binary digit, abbreviated to the term bit. Eight wires collectively containing data (called a bus) have eight bits or one byte. Computer data is stored in bytes based on a coding scheme called ASCII (or 8 bit ASCII). The 8 bits used to store data should not be confused with address and machine instructions which (on current generation processors) with 32 bits (or 4 bytes or 2 words). Because of the base 2 nature, one kilobyte of Ram is 1024 bytes or 2^10. One Megabyte is 2^20 bytes, and one gigabyte is 2^30 bytes. Hard drive manufacturers have chosen (probably for marketing purposes) to use base 10. A million bytes is less than 2^20. In short 2^(10 * x) > 10^(3 * x), where if x=1,2,3 you are talking about kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes. (for the math people here, x has to be a non-negative integer).
And they said I wasn't a smartypants!
I'm not all that old (25 tomorrow) and I clearly remember the uproar when several major hard drive manufacturers (lessee, WD, Maxtor, Connor [yes Connor]) changed from using 1k=1024 to 1k=1000. I don't remember when it was, but I could probably pull out an old PC Magazine from the era and demonstrate. The claim they've always used 1k=1000 is blatantly false, sorry.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Even though I know *why*, it still pisses me off. I paid for two zeros! I want my two zeros!
Maybe I'll take back $14.34 from the purchase price - "Ahh! I know the tag said 299.99, it's just that my money is smaller when *you* get it."
graaay daaaviiss... it is taaaime...
I... AM... A... POLITICIAN...
It matters a lot! This is'nt some touchy feely interprative thing. We deal with absolutes. You can't lie to the compiler it can't be fooled.
That was just an arbitrary call as any other. Silly submitters.
-bZj
.sig
3000 /. users spenting five minutes each reading this thread = one hell of a waste of time.....
Glad I stayed away from the scroll lock thread.
LMAO
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Why not just use a standard based on how many Mp3s or DVD rips you can store on a device?
"Derp de derp."
Yeah, I haven't noticed it _not_ be that since early yesterday.
I remember how in the old days of dot matrix printers the manufacturers would show their print speed in 12-chars-per-inch mode (compressed), which of course was faster per second than the typical 10-chars-per-inch printing most people did... :-)
I think inkjet printer makers now like to quote their pages per minute in b&w draft mode.
Hitachi(formely IBM)'s 120 GB HDD:
123,522,416,640 bytes
So-called 120 GiB (120 * 2^30 bytes):
128,849,018,880 bytes
When Windows reads Hitachi's HD:
123,510,771,712 --- 115 GB
So Windows loses 11,644,928 bytes (possibly to filesystem?). Mac OS X loses 1026 bytes.
Article doesn't use GiB unit.
- It uses terms like "binary math" versus "decimal math". Last I checked, they were both equally viable ways of doing math, and as any viable method of doing math should be, they both always get the same answer! See section 3.5 if you want to get really mad! It isn't that the math is different that is causing a problem, it is that the algorithm is different. It just so happens that the algorithm was inspired by a number which is convenient when dealing with binary because it is an even power of 2.
- There is no discussion of why HDD makers use normal math while OS makers use "computer-ese". It isn't wholly discountable that HDD makers are interested in making their drives look as big as possible against the competition, and if one manufacturer says a Gigabyte is 10^9 bytes then they all have to. And he paints the 1024-byte KiloByte basically as a stupid idea, which it isn't (albeit confusing).
- The explanation (such as it is) for how much data is lost to OS overhead is inaccurate at best. He got his info for the Mac from the Drive Utility (akin to Disk Management or fdisk in MS-land), but got his WinXP info probably from the explorer. Fdisk will not report any filesystem size considerations, just the partition sizes, so neither should the Drive Utility. I'm betting the 1026 "lost" bytes are the partition table. This makes it look like the Mac loses 1026 bytes, while Windows tosses about 11 MB out the door. While I'm not trying to advocate for Windows, that simply isn't fair. He goes on to say that he has "no explanation for these variations", which brings me to my next point.
- He can't explain the size variations between OSes, yet he makes this statement:
So now he's trying to explain it, and not doing a very good job. First of all, the FS overhead will vary roughly proportionally to the size of the partition, so giving out a number like 70 MB and saying that a "typical drive" loses this much is careless at best. Secondly, I'm not conviced that he doesn't actually have 70 MB of data on that drive. There's no accounting for the 11 MB that aren't showing up as "used", which sounds like FS metadata to me. I don't have a drive handy to format, so I don't know if Windows shows "0 used" on a clean NTFS drive or not (oh, is he using NTFS or FAT32... the world may never know). The bottom line: he should have used the Disk Management tool to compare apples to apples (no pun intended).
- And the bottom bottom line is that he's in the storage business, and shouldn't be so ignorant. He's got a degree in mathematics for crying out loud!
I appreciate that this needs to be explained, and I know all too well that the average computer user (read average American) can hardly count, much less do it in binary, so a simple explanation is good. But I never think things should be simplified to the point of gross inaccuracy. This is just further compounded with the obvious lack of a clue. Someone write a better (and perhaps shorter) account for this, please!Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
1 kilobyte = 8.192 kb or 8192 b (8 * 2^10)
1 megabyte = 8.389 Mb or 8388608 b (8 * 2^20)
1 gigabyte = 8.590 Gb or 8589934592 b (8 * 2^30)
A 120 GB hard drive would become a 960 Gb hard drive.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Now it took this guy six pages to explain the difference between 1000 and 1024.
Anyway, anyone who didn't know that 1GB = 2^30B woudn't probably have noticed the loss of their 8 GB, and the manufacturer clearly used that fact to virtually increase the capacity of their disk by using base 10 instead of base 2.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent - Salvor Hardin
Somehow I get the feeling that it's mostly Americans who refuse to accept that kilo=10^3, mega=10^6, giga=10^9. (Please read on before moderating as troll/fb.)
I guess that's because you aren't used to kilo, mega and giga, except to the (incorrect) power-of-2 definitions. To someone who lives pretty much anywhere else in the world (ie. where metric units are used), kilo has always been 10^3 and mega has always been 10^6. Well, except in most fields of CS (but not telecommunications or HDD capacity).
What's happening is that several different fields of science are slowly starting to overlap, and suddenly there's real confusion: for someone, kilo=10^3, for someone else it's 10^3 EXCEPT in some cases it's 2^10.
This source of confusion should be fixed now when it's still possible. It may seem to this audience that Computer Science == Life (and most of you probably don't need to think about data in terms of telecommunications) and therefore you think kilo=2^10 is standard, but for a huge majority of people it simply is not so.
Kilo has always been 1000 and will always be 1000. It's us the computer people who have made a mess of it, and we're also responsible for cleaning it up.
It is in the US where for some reason they don't include sales tax in the ticket price. Is it optional, like tipping?
The Harddrive manufactures changed to the base ten
becuase they knew that thay could claim an 80GB
drive with what used to be a 74 GB drive at best.
They pocket the difference, if this had of happened
with RAM chips you would have seen an uproar but
becuase their size is so small you can't get away
with that rubbish. All Ram is sold using Base 2 still.
How much is a billion?
If you are American, it is undoubtedly 1,000,000,000. This amount is known to traditionally minded British people as `a thousand million', and by some more adventurous ones as a 'milliard', though this word has not made as much headway in English as in some other European languages. A trillion is then 1,000,000,000,000, and so on.
If you are British, on the other hand, a billion may be 1,000,000,000,000 (a million million), following the older convention.
If you are neither British nor American, you can take your pick! (Both systems were invented by the French, but are called 'British' and 'American' for convenience.)
Once the business world and the financial press found themselves discussing `thousand millions' so much, the 'American' system simply became more convenient, despite a certain lack of logical tidiness.
Wish I could get mod points, cause this AC point really deserves some. Since I don't, I'll just burn a little karma to try to draw attention to it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's irrelevant to everyone but coders.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Now if the drive manufacturers really wanted to go decimal, they'd use a 10 bit byte...but that would mean they had to give you a bigger drive for your money!
Oh yeah, and did anyone else laugh like a drain when the author used "IBM", "hard drive" and "reliable" in the same paragraph? ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I remember, in the 80s, computer magazines always tried to make clear that a 64K computer had 65536 bytes of RAM, not 64000. Indeed there was a distinction between the notations K and kB, the former meant multiples of 1024, the latter multiples of 1000. However with M and G this distinction no longer exists.
No sizes in the computer world are natural exponentials of 10. However, there are lots of units that are natural exponents of 2. I got 2^29 = 512 MiB of RAM, I got 2^27 = 128 MiB of GFX memory and so on. It'll never, ever be natural to say that I have 536,870912 MB of RAM. What you are in fact asking is to widen the gap between the average consumer (that is confused) and the techie that knows (and sometimes must talk) about base 2 and base 10, not bridge it. If you want to define on universal "right" size, that size must be base 2.
Or, you can expect people to try to grasp the difference between two different systems used interchangedly, which is exactly what has brought us to where we are today.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The unit is a byte. The question is, does the prefix "kilo" have base 2 (2^10) or base 10 (10^3).
In short, an engineer somewhere need a short way to describe 1024 bytes. So he called it a kilobyte. Since computer engineers were a small group of highly educated specialists, everybody knew that a kilobyte wasn't to a byte the same as a kilogram was to a gram. It was useful, easy to remember, and so it stuck. Then a) computers became a mass market item and b) marketing started using 1 kilobyte = 1000 to get bigger numbers. And so the confusion started.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This whole debate strikes me as quite similar to the old Avoirdupois vs. Troy measurement debate. The ratios are even comparable: The Troy ounce is about 1.1 Avoirdupolis ounces. The same potential for consumer confusion also exists: if someone was used to dealing with Troy ounces, and purchased gold from someone who chose to use Avoirdupolis ounces, it would appear that they were getting far more for their money than they actually were.
m l). Every day users will probably use short kilobytes without specifying 'short'; computer designers will probably use long kilobytes without specifying 'long'; and the threshhold cases can specify which are being used. (While new hard drives may not need to say "160 short gigabytes" prominently on the front, they could include that information in the footnotes.
This situation was finally resolved by making it clear in what context each measurement would be used. Gold is measured in Troy ounces; most other things are measured in Avoirdupolis ounces. Some threshhold cases might cause confusion (say, consumers buying a gold watch...), but the default case is to assume Avoirdupolis when units aren't measured, except when dealing with gold directly.
I think we could apply this to the Kilobit problem. Clearly, the general public doesn't need to know about the 2^10 notation. On the other hand, that notation is far too convenient for computer people to abandon it (or to start trying to use politically correct units). So I support the above poster's suggestion of "Long" and "Short" kilobytes (as proposed by Donald Knuth, see http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.ht
I was going to put a sig here, but I had already submitted the message.
OK, the typo where you put a 1 instead of a 2 has been beaten to death, so I'll say no more about it.
But I can vouch for part what you're saying, he's wrong on this, and the way he phrases it in the paper is a particularly arrogant and revolting bit of flamebait.
My first hard drive was a seagate 20megabyte, st-225 IIRC. It was just over 20 real megabytes, that is just over 21 million bytes in capacity. I remember very clearly, it was marketed as 20mb, sold as 20mb, but it did say something like '21.3mb (million bytes)' on the label after I got it home and looked at it. I remember thinking 'that's odd', shrugging, and installing it. Sure enough, just over 20mb. I got what I paid for, and all was good. Damn drive lasted forever too. I retired it because I didn't have space for it with all my new drives, not because it failed.
Anway, the only reason I won't call Mr. Wiebe a flat-out liar is because of that memory - at that date, at least, they were using both definitions of a megabyte, to some degree, but since the short version was only on the sticker, and it was advertised for what it was, he's being extremely disingenous at best - what he writes may not be technically a lie but it's every bit as deceptive as Clintons famous finger-wagging line. Or maybe he really believed what he wrote, in which case he's an ignorant buffoon. Either way...
IIRC this state of affairs stopped about the time 120mb drives were becoming popular, when one drive manufacturer started advertising the inflated number to make their drives seem like a better value than the competitors (was it Maxtor? Quantum? Anyone remember?) and the others quickly followed suit, despite the stink that was being made on BBSs and Usenet, because they rightly saw that most people didn't know the difference and were being fooled. So they figured they had to inflate their numbers too, in order to stay competitive. And I guess that makes some sense. I remember some started using 'million bytes' instead of MB or megabytes, while the less honest started just labeling their million bytes as megabytes without explanation. And yes, by the time consumer level GB drives came around, I think even the ones that had maintained technical honesty by writing 'million bytes' instead of megabytes dropped all attempts at honesty and the re-definition was a fait accompli.
It's still annoying and dishonest. But at least for the drive manufacturers there is a dollars and cents explanation that makes some sense. Mr. Wiebe, however... what's his excuse?
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I can't understand the fuss either. Hard drives have been like this as long as I can remember. I'm pretty young and only got my first PC 16 years ago - it was like this then. This is the second story recently about this, which is just pathetic. Instead of whining like a baby about this, these people should out promoting the use of the correct units: Ki, Mi, Gi, etc, instead of K, M, G.
1000000000 bytes or 10^9 - this is the definition used by telecommunications engineers and storage manufacturers.
My 1 Mbit line is a 1024 kbit line. Sell anything less in this country and the consumer protection organizations will get nasty on you. Though they didn't react when ISDN 64 kbit was 64000 bits, so even they aren't very consistent. I'm not even sure if my 1024 kbit are 1024000 bit or 1048576 bit, go figure.
Since most people who buy computers are not in "computer science or computer programming", I would argue the value used by storage manufacturers is perfectly applicable when selling computers in the mainstream.
And under medicine you'll find the definition: "Sugerwater - this is the definition used by snake oil salesmen." That the storage manufacturers have redefined it to suit their own economical gain doesn't make it valid for the consumers any more than sugarwater does a patient any good.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
jah, strange: ...
my ADSL package sais:
128 KiloBit per second.
so 128kbit / 8 = 16 kiloByte.
but if i download stuff i just see
12.5 kiloBYTE per second?
*yawn*.
after writing to ISP about this
discrepancy they told me
i was sharing bandwidth with other
ADSL users
>:o
is 75 cm how far you can smell a ejac or what. ...
me thinks RANGE of ejac
is more like 1'500 m, if you count one ejac
as smellable
I may being anal, but if that is what it says on the box, then that is what I expect to get.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
It's how you use it!
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
So I guess a 'megalopolis' means a million cities all packed into one?
When you're not using the metric system, mega, kilo, et al don't mean base 10 at all - and computers aren't measured using the metric system.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
from http://www.keidel.com/mech/pvf/pipe-intro.htm
64M is shorthand for 64*1024*1024 bytes. You will not find memory with a capacity of exactly 64,000,000 bytes. There are only a very few legitimate sizes for memory. Furthermore, only very simple arithmetic is allowed on memory sizes. You just don't add 64M plus 2k.
Disk capacities, even if based on 512 byte hard-coded sectors, comes in a large variety of possible sizes. It is completely feasible to add disk capacities of dispartite sizes, as in 120G plus 200M. Adding the sizes works decently only if the places after the decimal work as expected, ie half of a G is 500M, not 512M. Try adding up your file sizes expressed in gigabytes if 1 gigabyte is the nominal 1024*1024*1024. How do you express 1 byte in such a system?
The problem is that while memory is sold in "bakers dozen" type nominal units, this does not dictate these units anywhere else, just like the half-inch of half-inch pipe does not dictate anyone else's half-inch.
First of all let me tell you I've been working with computers for about 20 years now. So if you ask me, a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilobyte is 1048576 bytes (same as a lot of people who work with computers). However...
Most people here complain that "a kiloBYTE has always been 1024".
But that's the point right there. A kiloByte has always been 1024, and has always been wrong!
Kilo is a decimal prefix meaning 1000. The fact that people have been using kilo to mean 1024 for 30, 40 or even 50 years doesn't make it right.
A lie is a lie, even if it's been going on for decades.
Megabyte = 1 000 000
Mebibyte = 1 048 576
Heck, a kilometer isn't 1048576 meters, why should computers mess up the metric system? Yes they use base 2 and so should NOT use the decimal prefix for their units (since it just doesn't fit in chunks of 1000 units).
Hence the new "MeBi" notation (which makes sense, since it's the first two letters of the decimal system suffixed with Bi for binary)
The general public is confused, and with good reason. Wouldn't that screw with your mind if one liter of COOKING oil was the same as 0.54236 liter of CAR oil?
We've stolen decimal prefixes and happily screwed what they meant for decades, we gotta clean the mess and use something else (MeBi, etc)
End of story.
kidebyte
medebyte
gidebyte
tedebyte
pedebyte
:)
and so on.
Now if you decimal people really like the base-10 units so much, how about starting using these names? And we keep our binary ones.
P.S. Just think - a pedebyte of porn.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This all seems to be an unnecessary problem created by Computer Science.
"kilo" is a standard prefix for 1000. It is documented as such.
From the online dictionaries, the best definition of "kilobyte" is that it is 1024 and the nearest power of 2 to the value 1000. "Nearest" is not what I would consider a reasonable definition. I completely understand the convenience of using a power of 2, but the term should not have used the prefix "kilo". That's just plain mis-leading.
The fact that the term is well understood in Computer Science is no excuse for it being a terrible name. The rest of the world agreed a definition for "kilo" (before bytes were being discussed), so why should anyone believe that it's reasonable to redefine it? I reckon Computer Science is wrong, and the rest of the world is right.
2^10 = 1,024, so:
2^10 vs. 10^3 = 2.40% error
Likewise,
2^20 vs. 10^6 = 4.86% error
2^30 vs. 10^9 = 7.37% error
2^40 vs. 10^12 = 9.95% error
2^50 vs. 10^15 = 12.59% error
Anywho, if anyone cares, the relationship is not linear. The error grows expontntially. I've always wondered that, so I just figured it out (you can just subract 4.86 from 7.37, then 7.37 from 9.95 to see that the difference in the error grows). Just thought I'd share.
When you buy a 512MB RAM module, it's 512MB. Not 523.056MB RAM.
What gives?
What gets me, is that I bought a hard drive that was labelled 120GB. Now barring all the binary and base 10 speak, it seems logical that when I do a right-click and choose properties on my winbox that it read 120GB capacity. However, mine says 113GB capacity. No matter what number base it is measured in, I believe it should say 120GB. Whether I am actually getting ripped off or not is not the issue. The issue stems from the fact that I FEEL like I am getting ripped off. It seems dishonest somehow for their to be such a large discrepancy in sizes. I mean this gives the appearance that 7GB is missing. That is more than 70 times what my first hard drive was.
So, to beat my point comletely to death... Whether or not I am being cheated is not the issue. It is the feeling of being cheated.
This is another reason why people should have to take a test in order to obtain a "computer license" ... base 10, base 2, who cares. The big difference in drive space descrepencies can be attributed to the filesystem. Yes, the filesystem uses disk capacity. So, 120gb drive might only have 115gb free when formatted, but that doesn't mean you aren't getting that "storage"... it's overhead, and you're using for your filesystem. Its not hard to grasp.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
there are beer glass companies out there which specialise in less-than-one-pint beer pint glasses and hawk them to pubs, bars and restaurants.
for the customer, it does not make that much of a difference, but a bar that sells 90% of a pint as a full pint saves one pint for each 10 pints sold!
moreover, if you bring a measuring cylinder to a bar to show to the bartender that there's beer missing in your "pint", you get laughed out of the place. it's a bloody conspiracy.
A pint isn't 16 ounces?
I thought a 20 ounce pint was an imperial pint...
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I think we should make the decimal people use something else, and leave conventional, historical capacity measurements as-is. Everyone in the biz knows what a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes, megabyte is 2^20 bytes, kilobyte is 2^10 bytes, etc.
I like the Si system and agree that the 'namespace' has been regrettably polluted by these conventions, but I don't think it's nearly as awful as the idea of introducing entirely new magnitude prefixes such as 'mebi' or 'kibi', none of which makes any sense to me and sound like retarded baby gibberish when pronounced.
For the decimal sticklers, I propose instead we introduce 'dits', which are really bits, but when used with ordinary Si-style magnitude prefixes they are a truthful capacity representation.
One Gigabyte is 8 x 2^30 bits/dits. This is the same as ~8.59 Gigadits, og ~8.59 x 10^9 bits.
One Kilodit is 1,000 bits/dits, or 10^6 bits.
One Megadit is 1,000,000 bits/dits, or 10^9 bits/dits, og 122.07 KiloBytes.
And now the bait for the pesky marketing/sales folk out there using the bloated decimal 'gigabyte' count on storage media:
A nice fat 200 'megabyte' (200x10^11 bytes) harddisk would be the same as a 1.6 Teradit / 1600 Gigadits capacity harddisk. (It's the same as a 186 Megabyte capacity harddisk, incidentially.)
Can you see the attraction? BIGGAR NUMBER = MORE SALES! $$$$$! If we could make marketeers use this terminology, we'd see huge capacity figures on all the units (1,600GD HDD W00t!); we'd curse at having to calculate the 'real' Gigabyte capacity by dividing Gigadits with ~8.58; but here's the kicker : At least we'd KNOW it was a bullshit figure!
Start Using GIGADITS today!
(C) Sonny Windstrup
Supar genius
The problem is, the average consumer (read: dumbass) only knows how to count with their 10 fingers, so the whole idea that computers use Base 2 and therefore it's ok to use "kilo", "mega", etc as applied to base 2 counting is wrong. All you have to do is mentioned "base 2" to my mother and her eyes immediately glaze over. THOSE are the consumer who are being "mislead". Anyone else with a technical background knows and expects the discrepency.
This whole problem would have been solved already if the IEC had decided to give its new binary units reasonable names that people would actually use. "Kibibytes"? Come on. Someone needs to come up with a naming scheme that doesn't suck and promote it instead.
Visit the
How about Gigli-Byte, that one for sure would get a small audience ;-)
Anybody else find the pronunciations of mebibyte et al reminicent of that old Bill Cosby skit where his mouth was shot with novicaine?
I'd have to say that this might never catch on because it sounds like you have a speech impediment.
What is music when you despise all sound?
ACtually, the CS standard is revisionitst. You see metric prefixes are a DEFINED and STANDARDISED thing. They are part of SI units. IT is a whole set of definitions covering all different kidns of units and their relations. IT also covers prefixes. The prefixes are defined in base 10, since that is the base in which humans normally operate and the base in which it is most useful for the other defiintions. So kilo is defined as 10^3, mega as 10^6 and so on. This is well understood.
Now, somewhere along the line, computer people decided to go ahead and use SI prexies, but use them for a nearby base 2 number. So instead of kilo meaning 1000, which doesn't work out evenly in base 2, they used it to mean 1024, which neatly works out to 2^10. This was then used for other SI prefixes as well.
Thing is, this isn't correct usage, and also has the potential to cause confusion. So the IEC decided to try and make some base-2 prefixes for people to use instead. Now those havent' caught on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't correct.
So right now we have a confusing situation on our hands, where one prefix can mean two things. The harddrive manufacturers decided (for marketing reasons) to use the SI standard. OSes use the incorrect usage. Well, you can't really yell at the HD manufacturers about it, I mean THEY are the ones that are obeying the standard, it is the OS manufacturers that are disobeying it.
I swear I heard a Dell commercial the other day that touted a 40 gigabit hard drive in one of its notebooks. Anyone know anything about THAT?
The paper leans in the drive manufacturer's favor, which it shouldn't. It implies that the silly OS vendors have been misleading people by stating base2 storage sizes and not properly explaining this.
The reality of the situation is, in the computer realm (which is the only realm in which bytes, kbytes, Mbytes, abd Gbytes even matter), numbering has *always* been base2. Before the hard drive existed, the OS accounted storage and memory and anything else in base2 sizes. This was and always has been standard convention. Hard drive manufacturers have always bucked this trend, and enumerated their Mbytes and Gbytes as multiples of 1,000,000 bytes and 1,000,000,000 byets rather than their true value, because it trumps up the apparent size of the disk. It's a perversion of terms on the drive manufacturers' part.
These are the computer definitions of these numbers, and lying hard drive manufacturers are not allowed to change the definitions of the terms. If they want to call a 115GB drive a "123", then they need to state it as "123 Billion bytes", which is more factually correct.
While we're on the subject - the little "b" means bits, the big "B" means bytes, when you look at transfer rates this is important. Vis:
bit = b = basic unit, 1 single binary digit
byte = B = 8 bits
kilobyte = kB = 1024 bytes (= 8192 bits)
megabyte = MB = 1024 kB (= 1048576 Bytes)
gigabyte = GB = 1024 MB (= 1048576 kB)
kilobit = kb = 1024 bits (= 128 Bytes)
megabit = mb = 1024 kb (= 131072 Bytes, = 128 kB)
Therefore a 1.5Mb/s DSL connection (1.5 megabits per second) transfers 192 kB/s (192 kilobytes per second).
11*43+456^2
But nowadays, we have ordinary people using computers who, especially outside the U.S., know that K=1,000, M=1,000,000, and so on. Computers are used by more than computer science people now. Indeed, they're invading every aspect of everyone's life, including scientific applications, and having this rediculous inconsistency is increasingly a problem.
It's even inconsistent on computing equipment. When I get a file size reported to me in binary Gigabytes, and try to send it over a transmission line measured in decimal Gigabytes or store it on a drive measured in decimal Gigabytes, things don't work right. Look at the 3.5" floppy disks - they're called "1.44" disks, but what is that number? It turns out to be 1.44*1000*1024 bytes - so here have a unit that mixes the binary and decimal units.
Sure, there are many cases where this doesn't matter. But in the future, as systems get bigger this difference becomes more pronounced. "MiB" may look odd, but we're better off in the long term having unit prefixes having the same consistent meanings they've had everywhere else for decades. There was a time when "Kilobyte" was odd too.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I still prefer to measure my hard drives in Libraries of Congress. It is a standardized unit that everybody knows about.
At least, that was until some coding shop sold me a drive that would hold 20 GLoCs, and it turns out they meant gigalines of CODE! I feel so cheated.
And here you are complaining about, what, a 7.5% difference?
This is not universally true. I used to write firmware for disk drives (for a now-defunct company). Our capacity was reported neither in the decimal nor the binary system (as the author uses those terms). For our purposes, a megabyte was 1000 * 1024 kilobytes. The drive was less than a gigabyte, but I assume they would have used 1000 * 1000 * 1024 for that.
I thought I was the only one that thought I was getting short changed on disk space. In fact, I think I'm getting short changed on bandwidth. How do they calculate Mbit and/or MByte, Kbit and KByte?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
In the world of computers, K = 1024. M = 1024K, and G=1024M. Full stop. That's what it's always meant. HDs were measured that way as well. Also full stop.
The confusion only exists because lying weasels in marketing wanted their drive to sound bigger than brand X when, in fact, they were the same size. So they 'cheated' (that is, lied through their teeth) and gave the figure using base 10 notation knowing that everyone would read it as a base 2 value.
In other words, the the terms were fully derfined and no confusion existed until cheats decided to introduce confusion by fogging perfectly good terms.
Really, it's no different than claiming to sell gasoline for $0.99/Gallon and then redefining gallon to equal 1.5 quarts except that measurements of volume are backed by law and measurements of GB are not.
Drive manufacturers have always used Base 10 arithmetic to describe drive capacity. They 've always counted up their bytes just like nature intended,using all 10 fingers and sticking with standard arithmetic.They 've had every right to count their drive capacity in this manner.
This is not correct. In the late 80's and early 90's, hard drive manufacturers used 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, 1024 squared as a megabyte, etc. (I still have some old Seagate and CDC drives on my shelf that were tallied in this way.) The change came during the cut-throat competition of the early 90's, when manufacturers decided to compete with one another with inflated claims, rather than larger capacities. Once one of them inflated the claimed capacity of a drive, the others had to follow. The result: By the end of the 90's, no honest hard drive manufacturer remained.
This issue reminds me of a practice used in another industry. The auto industry commonly reports horsepower and torque for their cars as measured at the engine's crank/flywheel vs at the wheels. While the measurements themselves are an accurate reflection of an engine's general performance alone you typically do not just buy an engine, you buy a system which is the car. When the engine's performance in measured within the context of the car--meaning at the wheels--then the truth is revealed. That revelation shows, on average, a loss of 10-20% when power is measured at the wheels vs the crank. Which spec do you think a manufacturer is going to release?
I wonder what speed gigabit Ethernet really runs at.
marketers redefine electrical engineering units. Sort of like "benchmarketing" but they toy with fundamental units instead of statistics.
And now we have software and system "engineers" defending the marketers. How cute.
Remember this day when you are pissed off that your 1 TB drive is only 900 GB.
I would mock y'all more, but I need to go buy 1,000,000,000 bytes of RAM and a 16.5 to 19 inch inch 19 inch monitor. Oh, wait, that's DIFFERENT.
PS: There is one benefit to using marketer units over actual engineering units: those trick EE test questions like "how long does it take to transmit 1 MB at 1 MB per second?" (answer 1.048576 sec) will now be obsolete. Storage has always been measured in base 2 as that is how it's stored, but everything else like transmision speed are base 10.
Oh, wait, one more benefit: if we switch to trinary storage I will be very happy to use base 10.
Anyone else agree that this article is very poorly written?
Mega- could be considered special since it has other meaning besides SI, however that is not even necessary since in this case, the prefix in megalopolis is actually megalo- and not mega-.
ed2k://|file|jizmak.mpeg|640071|30C255DA1860BC0F24 5239ED6770CF5A|/
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Back in the day... it wasn't really a noticibly big deal that my 80MB hard drive wasn't a real 80MB, because even then a few MB wasn't a big deal. However, with an 80GB drive, we're suddenly talking about a whole whack of stuff you could store in those missing bytes.
So I'd say that yes, it matters, and with larger storage becoming more available, it matters more.
Mb = mega bit
MB = mega byte
etc.
a = a + 1
Or, you should be the one who thinks how the people intended to use it think. C++ is a command language. The statement is TELLING the computer to TAKE a and MAKE IT equal to a+1. Mathmatics is in the present tense, a = a + 1 isn't even coherent because math likes for things that are true to always be true. Programming is sequential and in command form. You are saying, I have some number a, take the value from a, add one to, then make a equal to that new value, which a = a+1 does quite nicely.
Sorry. I know at least one Computer Science prof who would disagree with you. He teaches a course where programming is explained ENTIRELY in terms of mathematics and boolean logic. His course shows that all computer programs can be rewritten in pure mathematical notation and thereafter rigorously proven using well-known mathematical laws, just like "regular" mathematical theorems. That's right: just like you or I can prove that "the sum of the natural numbers from 1 to n is equal to n(n+1)/2", we can just as rigorously prove (or disprove) the results of any computer program. There are automated programs for doing just that - they're called theorem provers. No offense, but I think any serious programmer should know that computer programs are nothing more than mathematical expressions. Computers are nothing more than very complicated, fast, calculating machines. You can do any calculation that a computer can using a pencil and paper; it will just take millions of times longer. Read a book on "Formal Methods of Program Design" if you don't believe me.
Mathematics is an integral part of CS and programming languages. Without mathematics, there would be no "science of computing". Any programming language can be interpreted as a series of boolean (mathematical) expressions. What do you think circuit boards are except for a bunch of AND/OR logic gates? What does a bit in main memory (or video memory, or your hard drive) represent other than a boolean value (TRUE or FALSE, 1 or 0, high voltage or low voltage, etc.). In C, the expression
a == b
is equivalent to the mathematical statement
a = b
if we take "=" to be the BOOLEAN "equals" operator in mathematical terms. If a is not equal to b, then in BOOLEAN logic "a = b" is "false", "not a theorem" or an "antitheorem", depending on what boolean terminology you like to use. If a is equal to b, then in BOOLEAN logic "a = b" is "true", "a theorem", etc.
If you wanna talk about the C assignment
a = a + 1
we can certainly rewrite this mathematically:
a' = a + 1
In boolean logic, the assignment translates as follows. The statement "a' is equal to the value of a plus 1" is true (or a theorem), where a' means "the final value of a" and a means "the initial value of a". The part about the statement being true is implied, just like when I say "it is raining outside", I really mean "the following is a true statement: it is raining outside". You would interpret "a = a + 1" to mean "I command the computer to increase the value of a by 1". Okay, if you want to look at it that way, it's not really a mathematical expression. On the other hand, I can interpret "a = a + 1" to mean "the final value of a is the initial value of a plus 1" is a "true statement", which is definitely a mathematical statement.
Mathmatics is in the present tense, a = a + 1 isn't even coherent because math likes for things that are true to always be true.
That's my point exactly, genius. The "=" in C programming means assignment NOT equality. But you have got to be kidding when you say "mathematics is in the present tense" and things that are true must always be true. I guess we cannot use math to describe the motion of a car that speeds up and slows down, since its velocity changes. Have you ever taken a high school course in physics? How can engineers launch a rocket to the moon if variables like ti
We don't use 'E' to write a summing loop in C, because it doesn't make sense to a computer programmer. It makes sense to a mathematician, who are not programmers.
That's partly because summation is not a built-in operator for C, jackass. Furthermore, how are you going to use the keyboard to type in a big Greek SIGMA (NOT an "E"), with the initial value on the bottom of the sigma, the final value on the top and the expression to be summer on the right? I am talking about a reasonable mapping between mathematics and computer science, since the latter is built on the former, not a literal 1-to-1 mapping.
Obviously there are a few people who think that programming C in their spare time makes them experts in Computer Science. Take a few 3rd or 4th-year university courses in Computer Science and tell your Profs how programming has nothing to do with mathematics; come back and tell us how long it took them to stop laughing. 1st year Calculus is a prerequisite for Computer Science at my university - why do you think that is?
Remember when console video games were sold by the size of the cartridge in megabits? "With 8 MEGABITS of PULSE-POUNDING ACTION!"
kilobyte: 1000 bytes
binary kilobyte: 1024 bytes
o/~ Join us now and share the software
It is correct to say the averge person does not know the exact size of a kilobyte, or care.
The average person does not know, or care, the conversion between a gallon and a litre (or kilogram and a pound).
But if you went to a petrol station and they said petrol was $X.00 a 'gallon' without CLEAR definition the 'gallon' differed from everybody elses' gallon. They use base 'Y' gallons which are 10% smaller, would you care?
Would you feel ripped off?
Simply the HD manufactures decided to redefine a standard unit of measurement to exagerate the specifications of their products.
this reminds me of a funny event at a streaming media trade show a couple years ago. Apple was there showing off a new version of Quicktime that claimed an amazing quality advantage a very low data rates compared to Microsoft and Real. The standard measurement of data rates in streaming is Bits per Second (normal bandwidth terminology). So Apple is showing this glorious full screen video at 80 "K" per second. The I asked the booth bunny if it was Bits or Bytes. She didn't know. The marketing manager was called over and admitted it was Bytes. "We use our own math". Those kooky apple guys.
How many Ooglybits in Jigglybyte?