Apple Kicks HDD Marketing Debate Into High Gear

quacking duck writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has updated a support document describing how their new operating system reports capacities of hard drives and other media. It has sided with hard drive makers, who for years have advertised capacities as '1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes' instead of the traditional computer science definition, and in so doing has kicked the debate between marketing and computer science into high gear. Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance (though manufacturers have wholeheartedly accepted the 'new' definitions for GB and TB). Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, breaking decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?"

Comments

Its been done for years already

[sopssa]

Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, breaking decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?

No, its not any first major step. HDD makers already went there years ago, its established and people know better what it means. And even if I'm quite a nerd myself, I never think that 1 terabytes = 1 048 576 megabytes. Yeah it would be great if I remembered that or as many decimals in PI as possible, but no one really cares. It's a lot easier to remember and think that 1 terabyte is 1 000 000 megabytes, even if its not technically so because of binary system and even if I know that - I still think so just for the easy of it.

And its a mac. What did you think? It's as far from a nerdy computer as possible. Obviously they are going to use terms and units that non-geeky people understand.

Re:Its been done for years already

[sopssa]

Your example is bad because its the default one. 1 terabyte to 1024 gigabytes is easy. How quickly you calculate that to 4TB? 15TB? 492TB? Or for more better example, 405GB to MB's? Its just a lot easier to think 405GB = 405 000MB than start calculating it, while its kinda close anyway.

Re:Its been done for years already

[mwvdlee]

The problem isn't the definition, it's that OS's and hardware manufacturers have been using different definitions. If both of them would stick to factors of 1000, there would be no problem. If they all stick to 1024, there would be no problem. The problem is that both definitions are used.

Personally I'd vote for 1000, since it's just easier for most people. That way they could easily know that 1001 1MB files do not fit on a 1GB USB stick and all the world would be consistent.

Benchmarks

[TheCount22]

This mean the downloads will seem faster on a Mac. What about benchmarks? Does this mean we are going to see tons of amateur reviews with inaccurate results? I hope Apple gives us a way to switch back to GiB mode in any case.

Re:computers user base 2

[evilbessie]

You want to accept inconsistancies within your own field (MHz, GHz, MB etc.) rather than havng to change things. Because it's not as if anything ever changes with computers. Some parts of computers use base 2, others do not, there has been a definitive set of standards since 1999, getting MS on board would pretty much solve the problem as that is what people would then see their computer tell them.

Silly names

[AdamHaun]

Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance

Nobody's going to use an annoyingly cutesy word like "gibibyte", which seems just as silly now as it did ten years ago. Using the abbreviated prefixes might be a good idea, though.

Just for reference (since some people are freaking out about how much space they're "losing") here's the percentage difference between the SI and binary sizes:

Kilobyte: 2.3%
Megabyte: 4.6%
Gigabyte: 6.9%
Terabyte: 9.1%
Petabyte: 11.2%
Exabyte: 13.3%

So for the foreseeable future your hard drive will be about 10% smaller than advertised. Not a big deal, IMHO (it's not like you're paying for the missing bits), but still worth pointing out.