When 1 GB Is Really 0.9313 Gigabytes 618
Posted
by
timothy
from the internal-struggle dept.
from the internal-struggle dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When it comes to RAM, as every geek knows, 1 GB does not mean 1 billion bytes.. it means 2**30 (1,073,741,824) bytes. However, several decades ago "they" decided that GB, MB, and KB would be interpreted differently when it comes to disk drives; 1 GB means exactly 1 billion bytes. Ed Bott points out that Microsoft's marketers and Windows kernel developers aren't on the same page when it comes to these units: the marketers use the more generous decimal interpretation, while Windows measures and reports capacity using the binary (2**30) measure. Careful customers who bother to check what they've got have been known to get peeved by the discrepancy."
"Real GB" or "marketing GB"? (Score:2, Interesting)
If there's a query about which units are being used, the question "Is that 'real' GB or do you mean 'marketing' GB?" is the way I usually phrase it.
Re:"they" can fuck off, the binary units are the o (Score:5, Interesting)
A much bigger problem is manufacturers having their devices marketed with 64GB of storage when only half of that amount is available for the user due to the other half being taken up by the OS and pre-installed apps.
Re:"they" can fuck off, the binary units are the o (Score:2, Interesting)