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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)

submitted 10 months ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

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[+] wischi@programming.dev -30 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If a hard drive has exactly 8'269'642'989'568 bytes what's the benefit of using binary prefixes instead of decimal prefixes?

There is a reason for memory like caches, buffer sizes and RAM. But we don't count printer paper with binary prefixes because the printer communication uses binary.

There is no(!) reason to label hard drive sizes with binary prefixes.

[–] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

It more accurately describes how much space you have and how you can expect to see it shown in your software when you actually install it somewhere.

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

So here’s the thing. I don’t necessarily disagree with you. And if this had done from the start it would never had been a problem. But it wasn’t and THAT is what caused the confusion. You put a lot of thought and research into your post and I can very much respect that. It’s something you feel strongly about and you took the time to write about your beef with this. IEC changed the nomenclature in the late 90s. But the REASON they changed it was to avoid the confusion caused by the drive manufacturers (I bet you can guess who was in the committee that proposed the change).

But I can tell you as a professional IT person we never really expect any drive (solid state or otherwise) to be any specific size. RAID, file system overhead, block size fragmentation, etc all take a cut. It’s basically just bistromathics (that’s a Hitchhiker’s reference) and the overall size of any storage system is only vaguely related to actual drive size.

So I just want to basically apologize for being so flippant before. It’s important enough to you that you took the time to write this. It’s just that I’m getting rather cynical as I get older and just expect the enshittification of every to continue ad infinitum on everything digital.