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Your Hard Drive Lies to You
fenderdb writes "Brad Fitzgerald of LiveJournal fame has written a utility and a quick article on how all hard drives from the consumer level to the highest level 'enterprise' grade SCSI and SATA drives do not obey the fsync() function. Manufacturers are blatantly sacrificing integrity in favor of scoring higher on 'pure speed' performance benchmarking."
Are you an American?
(That would explain why you don't know shit about Kilo, Mega and Giga....)
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It would be appropriate to market hard disks in terms of metric gigabytes etc, if any operating systems reported disk space in terms of metric gigabytes. But since they all report space in GB, meaning 1,073,741,824 bytes, you can understand why consumers are annoyed to find that the disk they bought isn't as big as it said it was. This IEC standard to introduce kiB, MiB, GiB is just a joke. Standards are supposed to standardize existing practice, not just make up some stupid names for things.
Simple fact; anyone who wants to be pedantic about it can correctly argue that the 1024 definition of kilobyte is wrong. What they can't do is give any proper justification for changing a definition that everyone knew and understood to mean 1024 bytes.
Because it's not a simple fact. kilobyte is 1024 bytes when referring to binary addressed data (such as RAM chips) but is 1000 bytes when used in other areas, such as network bandwidth, or floppy drive space, or bus bandwidth, or what have you.
The problem is everyone does not know and understand 1024 bytes to be one kilobyte, they only presume it always does, when it quite obviously doesn't.
Since you've demonstrated confusion over the matter yourself by making a blanket statement that 1024 bytes is one kilobyte, while ignoring the times when it IS NOT one kilobyte, you demonstrate a need for rejecting the system that lead to your own confusion.
Don't even *think* of saying that using decimal kilobytes et al had any purpose other than making drives seem bigger than they were; that trick only worked because everyone had previously agreed that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes.
Why do you say such inaccuracies? drives going back to the first drives ever made used kilobyte = 1000 bytes. It has always been that way and that is the correct way because a hard drive is not binary addressed data rather it is arbitrary based on the number of bits that fit on a circle of metal. Nobody "previously agreed that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes" because that is a blanket incorrect statement.
People agreed that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes only when referring to binary addressed data which is not the case on a hard drive platter which is an arbitrary size much like network speeds or things like bandwidth. The only time in a hard drive life when kilobyte=1024 is when you are talking about the MAXIMUM ADDRESSABLE DATA over the controller that the drive is attached to. and that has a bit width and therefor is a power of two.
Drives always have been decimal binary even from when they were first research-only inventions. it is revisionism to suggest it is all marketing and you have fallen into a trap of thinking that.