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Data Storage Operating Systems Software Hardware

Hard Drive Capacity Confusion, Lucidly Explained 482

Posted by timothy from the fudging-the-numbers dept.
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."
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Hard Drive Capacity Confusion, Lucidly Explained More

Hard Drive Capacity Confusion, Lucidly Explained

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  • Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:28AM (#7160508) Journal
    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!"
    • 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? I don't think that's the point. The point is that what is advertised is NOT what you get. The problem doesn't just apply to hard drive manufacturers but to everyone under the sun. It's a question of being open and truthful about what you are really selling.
      • But the article says that you, in fact, get what the hard drive manufacturers are claiming. The only difference is in the OS reporting.
        • But if I'm going to buy a 120 GB hard drive, i expect there to be 120 * 2^30 = 128,849,018,880 bytes on the drive. The hard drive I got had 113 GB (113*2^30 = 121,332,826,112 bytes). That is a difference of 7,516,192,768 bytes (7 GB). If the box says 120 GB, there should be 120 GB on the hard drive. If there's actually 113 GB on the hard drive, that's the number that should be on the box. Allowing those two hard drives to be on the same shelf in the stores is misleading to consumers and it should be re
          • Please take note that the amount of free space on an empty, but FORMATTED hard drive will always be a noticable chunk less than full capacity as the OS requires storage space overhead for the file system.

            I just finished explaining this to someone who was whining about their 128MB USB keychain drive only having 123MB of space.

            Your directory structure has to be kept somewhere.

          • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:4, Informative)

            by vrt3 ( 62368 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @03:19AM (#7161076) Homepage
            if I'm going to buy a 120 GB hard drive, i expect there to be 120 * 2^30 = 128,849,018,880 bytes on the drive.

            if I'm going to buy a 120 GB hard drive, I expect there to be 120 * 10^9 = 120,000,000,000 bytes on the drive.

            The hard drive I got had 113 GB (113*2^30 = 121,332,826,112 bytes).

            The hard drive I got had 113 GiB (113 * 2^30 = 121,332,826,112 bytes).

            That is a difference of 7,516,192,768 bytes (7 GB).

            That is a difference of - 1,332,826,112 bytes... actually there were more bytes than you should have expected.

          • It's not really that hard to figure out. AFAIK, ALL hard disk manufacturers report their drive sizes in terms of 10^9 bytes. Because of some grand conspiracy to decieve? No. Simply because statistically speaking a person who walks down the aisle of his local electronics store is more likely to buy the drive with the big number "120" on it than the one that has a "113". Anybody who used the 'binary' system would be giving up a lot of sales because people would simply choose the one with the bigger number.

            A

    • 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?

      Seen in isolation it doesn't really matter. But the point remains that the HD sellers are using the wrong count and the question that comes to the person who knows is "why?". The answer is simple - to mislead, by making the customer feel they are getting more than they actually are. In a free market it is important that any attempts to mislead the consumer be add

      • Seen in isolation it doesn't really matter. But the point remains that the HD sellers are using the wrong count and the question that comes to the person who knows is "why?". The answer is simple - to mislead, by making the customer feel they are getting more than they actually are. In a free market it is important that any attempts to mislead the consumer be addressed, for it is a greedy system.

        The hard drive manufacturers are not trying to mislead anybody. They are using the correct notation for the ca

        • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by MSZ ( 26307 )
          The hard drive manufacturers are not trying to mislead anybody.

          Oh, they are. Just in a less obvious way.

          They are using the correct notation for the capacity of the drive.

          I will then suppose that when you buy 512MB memory module, you expect it to have exactly 512000000 bytes of capacity, right? It's the proper way, right?

          The traditional and accepted way is to go with powers of 2. This is incomaptible with ISO/SI/whatever but it's they way we all (except some deviants and marketeers) love.

          Now I woul

          • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @06:37AM (#7161584) Homepage Journal
            "In reality it seems that they want to sell product with decimal G capacities but have customers believe they are buying disk with conventionally calculated capacity and hoping that no one would notice."

            This is all so absolutely ridiculous. Firstly, about 99% of people on the streets, including most computer users, aren't mentally calculating the power of 2 capacities when you say that a hard-drive has 40GB, or a memory module has 512MB -- Instead they mentally have an awareness that 40GB is "big, but 80GB is better", and "512MB is good". I highly doubt they're going to get their shiney new drive, and DRATS! - they have 42949672960 of virus filled emails to fit in there, but instead they only got 40000000000.

            Secondly, hard drive manufacturers, as a general rule, have used the power of 10 rule since before I first became interested in computers about 18 years ago - this is the standard, and if you haven't read the byline "GB refers to 1,000,000,000 bytes" then you just haven't been looking.

            This whole campaign is just contrived and attention seeking nonsense. I suspect that someone just finished their "Computers 101" course, and they think they've discovered an amazing fraud being perpetrated upon the public by those dastardly harddrive manufacturers.
          • I will then suppose that when you buy 512MB memory module, you expect it to have exactly 512000000 bytes of capacity, right? It's the proper way, right?

            I would expect the module to contain 536870912 bytes, but that's only because I know that memory manufacturers are using the wrong unit of measurement. If they advertised the module as 512MiB, then I would clearly know the capacity. (But probably nobody else would because most of the industry has been perpetuating this incorrect unit of measurement. Who'

      • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Theatetus ( 521747 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @06:36AM (#7161578) Journal
        But the point remains that the HD sellers are using the wrong count and the question that comes to the person who knows is "why?". The answer is simple - to mislead

        Maybe I'm being a naive optimist here, but there seems to be a much more sensible reason:

        The way memory is addressed makes it convenient to use the base-2 units.

        Storage is not addressed in a way that makes it particularly convenient to use base-2 units.

        Got that? That's why we use them on memory. Storage is not addressed that way, so like everything else we tend to use base 10 to describe it.

        • Storage is not addressed in a way that makes it particularly convenient to use base-2 units.

          Yes it is. The smallest addressable unit of a hard disk is a sector - which is 512 bytes.

    • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:50AM (#7160614) Journal
      I'm a whiny nerd, and it doesn't matter much to me whether hard disk manufactures define sizes in multiples of base 10 or base 1010.

      But I want to know how each drive handles error correction. A sector isn't REALLY 100000000 bytes when stored on disk, but has extra information to help it detect and correct most small errors. Some manufacturer could skimp on the error correction to increase storage capacity or reduce cost, but the drive would likely crap out sooner than others on the market.
      • How often, in the last eight years or so, have you had a disk die gradually (potentially due to dead sectors)? How often have you had a disk die suddenly? I think platter space has reached the point where sector errors are negligible next to physical breakdown, and no company would risk extra support when not necessary.
        • On the contrary, with every drive manufacturer pushing their physical media to the limit , sector errors happen a *lot*.

          Disks die suddenly because they *suddenly* run out of redundant sectors to remap your data to. This remapping happens transparently to the OS, inside the drive electronics and can usually only be picked up by deteriorating S.M.A.R.T. characteristics. There's only so many redundant sectors and once they're all in use your drive goes downhill will every bump and jolt.

          • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @06:03AM (#7161481) Homepage
            Um; if your drive's reporting a lot of reallocated sectors you should RMA it -- even with top-end 80G platters, sector remapping happens seldom.

            There are plenty of failure modes which will result in lots of remapped sectors, but that's a side-effect of the drive having difficulty reading/writing in general due to component failure, which to be honest is probably less common now than it has been.. uh.. ever (cooked and/or shocked to death drives excepted).

    • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by |deity| ( 102693 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:53AM (#7160627) Homepage
      Even the article states that you are losing 10% of the capacity you would expect. I think 10% is significant enough to complain about.

      The author at one point in the article says that operating systems have historically not documented how size is counted. Like the engineers at a drive manufacturing company aren't smart enough to know that if you calculate a kilobyte in base 2 you are going to calculate a megabyte, or gigabyte in base 2.

      Yes if you are smarter then your average computer user, which is to say smarter then a really dumb rock you should know that what's reported on a drive is not the actuall size.

      It still hacks me off. It's like a soda manufacturer deciding it's ok to redefine an ounce so that they can claim that their drink is larger then it is or just use a smaller container and claim it's still the same size.

      Does it matter, yes and it will matter more as storage capacity increases.

      If you use a computer it does all calculations in binary, it only makes sense for the capacity of the drive to be calculated in binary.

      • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:05AM (#7160680) Journal
        Like the engineers at a drive manufacturing company aren't smart enough to know that if you calculate a kilobyte in base 2 you are going to calculate a megabyte, or gigabyte in base 2.

        That's where the standard agrument fails, because mega, kilo, giga, terra, et al are base 10 prefixes not base 2.

      • Like the engineers at a drive manufacturing company aren't smart enough to know that if you calculate a kilobyte in base 2 you are going to calculate a megabyte, or gigabyte in base 2.

        Tell that to the people who called the 1474560-byte disks "1.44 MB".

    • Re:Does it matter anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bi()hazard ( 323405 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:48AM (#7160852) Homepage Journal
      This is a big issue for those who use RAID arrays based on intercahngeable hard drives. This is a common practice among large corporations, and drive manufacturers' nonstandard descriptions of sizes make it very difficult to mix manufacturers within an array.

      Buying from company A gives you 120GB=120 billion bytes, and buying from B gives you 120GB=128,762,169,664 bytes. If we have an array of 10 disks at the larger size and swap one out for the smaller size, the disks cannot be treated as interchangeable anymore, and the array loses much of its efficiency, or is forced to waste the extra space on the larger drives.

      The bottom line is that this costs money. Companies are locked into using one supplier and must pass up opportunities for good deals. The lack of flexibility and occasional screw ups by interns who don't check which drive is which uses up the IT department's time.

      Nobody really cares whether a GB is 1 billion or a funny number that comes from base 2, but a lot of people with a lot of money care whether 1 GB from company A equals 1 GB from company B. One of these days the industry will have to standardize.

      It's just as bad as monitor sizes-they measure those at funny angles and have different sized black margins around the viewable area. Just a couple months ago a manager here ordered a new 19 inch monitor and was so annoyed by the margins that he sent it back to be replaced. We gave him an old, lower quality monitor with the settings adjusted to minimize the margin. Some guy in IT took the new one home with him, and wrote it off as trashed defective equipment.

  • Gigi? Nah Gibi? Nah (Score:5, Funny)

    by l810c ( 551591 ) * on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:28AM (#7160509)
    How much Porn will it hold?

    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

    • Re:Gigi? Nah Gibi? Nah (Score:5, Funny)

      by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:46AM (#7160600) Journal
      How much Porn will it hold?

      This one will hold 30 days of Porn

      Now, now, now, this is just wrong!

      Everybody knows you don't measure porn in days.

      True porn afficianados know that you measure porn in terms of the amount of keyboard cleaning required.
      • True porn afficianados know that you measure porn in terms of the amount of keyboard cleaning required.

        Hmmmm

        Help me live longer! ...

        No.... I don't think I'll be doing that.

    • Re:Gigi? Nah Gibi? Nah (Score:5, Funny)

      by darkov ( 261309 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:11AM (#7160711)
      Your idea is good, but it needs a unit since "days of porn" clumsy. I propose the "ejac" which is one days worth of porn. Larger units are derived using the usual base 10 system:

      decaejac
      kiloejac
      megaejac
      gigaejac ... and so on

      This is a handy unit since it can be converted into time (1 ejac = 20 minutes), liquid volume (1 ejac = 10cc), sound volume (1 ejac = 90dB) and distance (1 ejac = 75cm).

      If we all pull together, with this as our common goal, we can make the ejac a truly universal unit.

    • I swear to god I actually did this--

      I was in Fry's computer store one day with a few friends when saw a guy holding *two* 120GB drives (about the largest drives there were at the time and very expensive). I walked up to him and said in my best strong bad impression, "Ouhhhgghh I bet those would hold ALOT of porn!"

      The guy turned bright red and didn't say a word :) But he knew :)

  • But seriously (Score:2, Funny)

    by nefele ( 654499 )
    The real units [nist.gov] joke is starting to get old...

    • Re:But seriously (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:59AM (#7160650) Journal
      Those are too hard to pronounce. Who not just distinguish them by prefixing the metric ones with the word "metric", as we do with tons and metric tons.

      kilobyte = 1024 bytes
      metric kilobyte = 1000 bytes
      • That's actually a pretty good idea! Much better than the MiB stuff that isn't "backwards compatible", causing it to be used by basically no one.

      • Re:But seriously (Score:2, Insightful)

        by itsme1234 ( 199680 )
        Oh, ye - so you want:

        1 kg = 1024 g
        1 metric kg = 1000 g

        1 km = 1024 m
        1 metric km = 1000 m

        Thanks, but no thanks.

      • Those are too hard to pronounce. Who not just distinguish them by prefixing the metric ones with the word "metric", as we do with tons and metric tons.

        Perhaps because there are more to the world than your corner, and practicly everone else uses the metric system? Logic dictates that it makes a whole lot more sence to do it the other way:
        One kilobyte = 1000 bytes
        One imperial kilobyte = 1024 bytes
        When all is said and done, 'kilo' is a prefix that means 1000x the base unit. It's the imperial system of m

      • Re:But seriously (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mindriot ( 96208 )
        No, because "kilo" is, in fact, a metric prefix. So a simple kilobyte should have its standard meaning as the SI unit prefix implies. You might however call the other one "non-metric," "binary," or "bastard" :-)... problem is, no one will use such terms. It is understood as an unwritten rule that anything suffixed with "byte" implies that the prefixes "kilo," "mega" etc. refer to 2^10, 2^20 etc. factors. Even more interesting, I suppose the "general public" doesn't even know how much a gigabyte is anyway, y

  • Big whoop (Score:3, Interesting)

    by attemptedgoalie ( 634133 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:31AM (#7160527)
    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.
    • Mirroring may help in the case of hard drive failure, but it isn't going to do much in the case of a virus, or a user pulling a stupid, or countless other things that could go wrong.

      No technological problem is going to be able to solve the problem of user education, no matter how hard we try.
  • 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.
    • That was my first impression, especially when I saw the author used a whopping six pages to explain this. But then, most people in their youth don't memorize the decimal values of the first 30 exponents of 2, like many of us here.
      • Oh man, that just brought back memories. A bunch of geeks sitting at Round Table pizza for a BBS party all trying to get the highest in base 2 decimals. 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, etc. all shouting to be heard.

        No wonder you'd never see a woman at those parties, must have scared them off. of course, nowadays, you see women geeks much more often, thank God.

  • In light of common sense (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dnotj ( 633262 )
    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.
  • 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?
    • I have to disagree - 6 pages to say "base 2 vs. base 10" and then completely miss the fraud question:

      3.7 Was the consumer ever cheated as a result? ... the comsumer always had all the capacity he was promised. Even if the drive capacity was reported as 115GB, the reality was that the drive was always storing all 123.5GB of (decimal based) capacity, as indicated by the drive manufacturer

      So, he's saying that the drive manufacturers gave the higher number, so on one should feel cheated. I think that if th
      • I disagree with you (politely). They should not feel cheated if the drive says 123.5GB. If it says 123.5 GiB (Notice the 'i') then they should feel cheated if the OS shows 115 GB. They can be sued for that.
        This is based on the other link in the story which is also very informative.

  • Ditch binary units (Score:5, Insightful)

    by achurch ( 201270 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:42AM (#7160576) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

      So you're saying that USA should use 1 KB = 1000 bytes, while the rest of the world don't need to? (sounds weird to me)

      Or are you saying that a group of people should try to enforce a new global standard where 1 KB = 1000 bytes? (sounds impossible to me)

      • Re:Ditch binary units (Score:3, Insightful)

        by achurch ( 201270 )

        I'm saying that the world should adopt 1kB = 1000 bytes, and that getting the world to do so would be nearly as difficult as getting the USA to switch to metric.

    • Re:Ditch binary units (Score:5, Informative)

      by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot.monkelectric@com> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:58AM (#7160873)
      Huh? no reason to use binary units? What are you smoking and can I have some? :)

      The reason we use binary units is for engineering reasons ... Back in the way back time there was no such thing as a disk drive, and there was only ram. Ram had/has to be made in a power of two because it has to completley fill its address space so the NEXT ram chip begins where the other ends. Otherwise you'd have holes in your address space.

  • Strange (Score:4, Interesting)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:42AM (#7160578) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MarvinIsANerd ( 447357 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:42AM (#7160579)
    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...
    • Well in a way it is a matter of base-10 vs base-2 because giga, terra, mega, et al are base 10 prefixes but people are applying them to base-2 applications (eg: memory).

    • Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lars T. ( 470328 )
      Yes, and the unit is Byte in both cases. Giga is shorthand for a factor of 1,000,000,000 like kilo is for a factor of 1,000. The problem is that some decades ago some geek thought that 1024 is close enough to 1000, so it would be k3wl to use "Kilo" (with a capital K) for a factor of 1024 (a base two factor). Hey, Kilo should be enough for everybody, nobody will ever run into having to distinguish between Mega (factor of 1,000,000) and, errm, Mega (or mega?) (factor of 1024*1024 - or 1000*1024?).
  • describe the size in terms of number of songs. (of course, /. regulars will describe in terms of how much porn)

  • 6 pages?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:45AM (#7160594)
    The 6 pages of the article, summarized in three lines:
    Hard drive manufacturers measure capacity in multiples of 1,000,000,000 (10^9) Bytes.

    Operating systems measure capacity in multiples of 1,073,741,824 (2^30) Bytes.
    Some people get confused because they both call it a gigabyte.
    I really don't think this is such a big deal. OSes are started to specify the proper GiB instead of GB, so there shouldn't be a problem anymore.
    • I really don't think this is such a big deal. OSes are started to specify the proper GiB instead of GB, so there shouldn't be a problem anymore.

      Afaik Linux has been linux this for a while, then again I'm not a kernel hacker so Here's the thread [helsinki.fi], it can probably explain better then I can.

      Just a side note: ESR strikes again (read that post ;) )

  • I've said this before (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sunlighter ( 177996 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:54AM (#7160630)

    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:

    • One short ton is 2,000 pounds and one long ton is 2,240 pounds.
    • One short kilobyte is 1,000 bytes and one long megabyte is 1,024 bytes.
    • One short megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes and one long megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes.
    • One short gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes and one long gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
    • One short terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and one long terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
    • And so forth...

    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?

    • It makes sense and is easy to remember.
    • Look all you have done is renamed something perfectly good to something longer and more stupider sounding.

      Mebibytes does not sound silly and people do use it. Long megabytes? Yuck...

      Computer scientists never intended for thier misuse of kilo, mega etc, to become a standard, it was always just a shorthand slang.

      Hard drive manufacturers have got it right this time. Now that we have the new kibi, mebi etc, units, there is no excuse to falsley claim that kilo can be anything other than 1000x.

      kilo = 1000x
      kib
    • Like Library of Congresses

      I want my 100 LoC drive.

      Ben
    • 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. (A
    • I prefer the simpler solution of just kicking people who complain about this in the head repeatedly. Perhaps one-billion (10^9) times (if their whine is particularly shrill, 2^30 should provide a thrilling excursion into the world of base 2).

      After all, the only people to whom the difference actually matters, are also those who are clueful enough to know how things work. For the average joe, all that's really important is whether drive A has more space than drive B or not -- and since all the manufs use

  • Naming reference (Score:3, Informative)

    by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:03AM (#7160670) Homepage
    He failed to name how the capacity should be described, though.

    Well, he does say this:
    ...because 1024 (a true kilobyte) is definitely not equal to 1000.


    And this:
    The author has recently heard about a naming convention that will attempt to clarify these terms, including confusion on kilobytes, etc.


    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.

    • Re:Naming reference (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @02:07AM (#7160898)

      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,

      Why shouldn't CS people stick to what the rest of the sciences have been using for decades, that "kilo" means 1000? This CS thing of making "kilo" stand for 1024 is an attempt at revisionist history.

      There's always another perspective.

  • 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...
  • 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 b

  • article sidesteps the entire issue (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drfireman ( 101623 ) <dan.kimberg@com> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:07AM (#7160693) Homepage
    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.

  • When all else fails, refer to Wikipedia... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jerk City Troll ( 661616 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:09AM (#7160701) Homepage

    I think Wikipedia's entry on gigabyte [wikipedia.org] should make this crap appear really stupid. Here's a clip from the entry:

    Because of irregularities in definition and usage of the kilobyte [wikipedia.org], the exact number could be any of the following:

    1. 1073741824 bytes - 1024 times 1024 times 1024, or 2^30. This is the definition used in computer science and computer programming.
    2. 1000000000 bytes or 10^9 - this is the definition used by telecommunications engineers and storage manufacturers.

    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.

  • Old chips, new drives (Score:4, Funny)

    by Flakeloaf ( 321975 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:13AM (#7160716) Homepage
    I don't know what he's talking about; my Pentium 66 insists that 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,000,000 exactly.

  • 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.
  • How many Libraries of Congress does this translate to? Come on people, use standard units!

  • And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by arb ( 452787 ) <amosba&gmail,com> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @01:35AM (#7160808) Homepage
    ...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 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.
  • I just bought a '200' gig Firewire drive - when I plugged it in it read '193'.

    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."

  • Article inaccurate and uninformed (Score:3, Informative)

    by rpwoodbu ( 82958 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @03:44AM (#7161135)
    The basic point of the article is accurate: that HDD manufacturers use "standard" metric prefixes and OSes use "computer-ese" "metric-esque" prefixes, thus the confusion. However, the article notably lacks in these areas (and perhaps less notably in others):
    • 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:
      We note that operating systems take a portion of drive capacity for use as file tables. A typical drive utilizes 70MegaBytes for this function, which is not significant on a drive with a capacity of 120GB.
      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!

  • In the pocket of the HDD manufacturers (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zog The Undeniable ( 632031 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @06:10AM (#7161503)
    Well, the article doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already. The only critical point is that 1GB in marketing-speak != 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, and that is still outrageous after all these years. "Easy to understand"...I don't think so.

    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? ;-)

  • Computers and Cars (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vraxoin ( 133352 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:51PM (#7165187)
    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?

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