47
LuxARTS
6y

People, please understand
1GB != 1024MB
1GB == 1000MB
1GiB != 1024MB
1GiB == 1024MiB

The MebiByte, GibiByte, KibiByte and others "biByte"s were defined at the end of XX century. How can be possible that people (I mean people which study/teach informatics, electronics or something similar) still don't know what is it?

Comments
  • 18
    Because it sounds absolutely ridiculous. I understand that using SI prefixes causes confusion, but meh, they could've come up with something a bit less cringeworthy.

    Also a lot of companies and marketing still mix these up, so it's even more confusing.

    Also, a lot of engineering disciplines have historical conventions that are outdated, but a lot of people still work with them. Also if everyone in my team says kilobytes instead of kibibytes and has been doing that for years, I'd find it much easier to say kilobytes instead of kibibytes.

    The change is happening though, but slowly.
  • 2
    I ranted about it earlier. I want to use SI units too :)
  • 5
    @FrodoSwaggins This.
  • 1
    @sudo-rm-rf haha indeed
  • 6
    I'm ashamed to say that, today, i learned something ( ._.)
  • 2
    1GB != 1025 MB all this timw in my live i was wrong
  • 2
    The competing JEDEC convention of "1MB = 1048576 bytes" doesn't help at all.

    I guess RAM manufacturers figured underselling was not worth the engineering pain, compared to storage manufactures.

    Let's not forget that this whole thing is the fault of storage manufacturers' marketing departments!
  • 0
    But the real cliffhanger is...

    1000MB =?= 1024MiB
  • 1
    Who hurt you?
  • 6
    1 Gay in Black == 1024 Men in Black

    I'm confused.
  • 0
    You confused me at this part:
  • 2
    People, keep in mind that the international system of units define the prefix with base 10 BUT the electronics operates with base 2.
    For example: You have a USB stick with 4 chips of NAND flash memory of 1KiB each one (4096 bytes). Its not the same if you divide the total size (partition) in 4 parts of 1KiB that if you divide it in parts of 1KB because in the first case you are using 1 chip for each partition so you would be using the full chip but in the second case you are using 1000 bytes of the chip and you will be wasting 24 bytes. Maybe 24 bytes sounds ridiculous but think now with GiB and GB, the number of bytes will increase. The worst thing it's this will fragment your files across chips so the memory access will be slower.
    I tried to explain it without much technicism, hope you understood my point.
  • 3
    @irene Oh, could you imagine how much slower RAM would be if your MMU had to bounds-check on n arbitrary values, instead of a handful of bitmasks?

    Yuck.
  • 0
    Does it really matter? My 1TB hard disk = 982 GB. Do I even care? No. Is there anybody who cares? I dont think so.
  • 0
    @hack Please read my comment
  • 0
    Welcome to matric system.
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