Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI is beautiful because it is consistent. The computer industry decided to use standard prefixes with non-standard (base-2) quantities. Now let's cut our losses and return to consistency with everything else.
The hardware is using sizes in powers of 2 because it's the only sensible thing to do, and numbers would be very annoying for users if the units didn't account for it.
> However, if you think about, it does make sense for the computer to use the same standard as the HD manufacturers.
No, it makes more sense for hard drive manufacturers to stop using a system that artificially inflates their disk size advertisements.
Somehow they're getting away with this.
Storage manufacturers have been using decimal prefixes for decades, you should probably get over it at this point.
1MB is one million bytes, and files do not intrinsically come in power-of-two sizes.
It may still make sense to use MiB for RAM though.
All else being equal, I see it as better to under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse:
In a world where there was one commonly-accepted meaning for MB (ie, the world where computers were invented, proliferated and became ubiquitous), and one assumed meaning (however logical it may be), users without the requisite nugget of binary knowledge would be positioned to be pleasantly surprised that they had "more than they paid for". In the case of file-sizes, this is to that users detriment, but in the case of the potentially more litigious issue of amount of drive space or RAM being purchased, this is to the users advantage.
For those that simply knew, on the other hand, things were just as expected.
Conversely, in the world where we now have two justifiable hard meanings for MB (one historical, one "canonical"), and people who go about endlessly correcting each other about them, we have handed the "things are as expected" situation to the everyday users, while the rest have inherited a mix of "less than I paid for" and "confusion".
All-up, not a worthwhile trade IMO.
The first commercial drive, the IBM 305, stored 100,000 characters on each of 50 platters, for 5 million total characters. Drives have been a base10 number of sectors for my entire lifetime.
Division by powers of 1000 ceased to be an expensive operation relative to user interaction a very very long time ago. And even back when it was, I am sure would the error have been in the order of 10% (as it is now with TB vs TiB), they absolutely would have taken the more expensive but more correct operation.
I just see no advantage in continuing to resist the unification of the meaning of prefixes. And where people prefer the old way for some nostalgic reason, just put the 'i' in there and you are good.
But "over-promise" could mean multiple things. If I'm buying a hard drive "over promise" means larger. If I'm figuring out how much space a game will take up on my hard drive before I buy it, "over promise" means smaller.
Okay, that question actually has an answer: the IEC. Unfortunately, lots of software disagrees with them, including Windows, because for some strange reason the IEC thought it was a good idea to redefine an existing measurement and then add a new term to mean what the old term used to mean.
The result was 100% predictable. Files now have two different sizes depending on which software you're using, and it's very difficult to tell which definition is in use. Even worse, the difference between these measurements is quite large, and converting between them isn't simple.
As much as I wish the United States used the metric system, I don't think we should redefine an inch to equal two centimeters...
Well, also the S.I?
Preffix "mega", initial "M", short for 10^6 since 1873...
Given the foundation of computing is binary, yes, files actually do come in power of two sizes.
1 and 0. Two. Base two.
From then, the way our bits, then bytes are structured.
8 bits to a byte for 8 bit addressing.
That's why 1KB was always 1,024 bytes.
Base 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024.
Recognize some of those numbers? Common ram sizes, also the increments in how many bits our architectures have been. These numbers remained constant because the foundation of computing was always Base 2.
Using Base 10 to calculate total storage space is a cheat when sector sizes are Base 2. There's no reason to use a different system (Base 10) for storage if Ram is Base 2 unless you're trying to inflate the specs of how much storage is being sold with a system.
Which is how the 1 MB = 1,000,000 Bytes bullshit originally started.
Until you re-format storage and ram sector sizes to be Base 10, and along with it, the number of bits of addressing our computing system uses, (Hello brand new architecture!) then there's no way to justify the renumbering of storage to Base 10.
As often in life there is not a single truth.
See e.g.:
- ISPs advertising network speeds in megabits per second instead of megabytes (who ever uses megabits otherwise???)
- Banks advertising interest-bearing accounts with APY and advertising loans with APR.
Do folks have other good examples? I’m sure there are lots.
EDIT: baud is not exactly the same as bits/second. But in those times, it was pretty much the same. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-dif...
* ISPs selling “up to” speeds.
* Screen sizes measured in inches-diagonal, without reference to aspect ratio.
* Cost of US products advertised without sales tax.
* Lots of things that “only cost X per day” to make the amount look small compared to the consumer’s monthly income.
* Supermarkets purposefully showing you price-per-unit for one product and price-per-weight for another allegedly comparable product.
* “Miles per gallon” still being used in countries where fuel is sold by the litre.
* Purposefully hard to multiply numbers used in monthly instalments. “Only 27 payments of $79!”
* Use of 9’s. “Only $999.99!”
* Food and drink manufacturers which are legally allowed to describe the quantity of an ingredient as zero if it is below a certain very small amount.
* CPUs sold as “up to X GHz” where that speed can only be sustained in specific and unmentioned thermal scenarios.
* Any product where the price is kept the same over time by decreasing the size over time, without mentioning it.
* Misdirection away from an important metric, like how AWS shouts about the great per-GB storage cost of S3 but doesn’t shout so loudly about the egress data transfer rate.
* Getting really basic now: simply putting a number in the product name to imply superiority. This is why Microsoft had to call the second Xbox the 360: because “Xbox 2” would sound less than its main competitor, the PlayStation 3.
Some of these probably go beyond the theme of misleading measurements and into the realm of my general hatred for the marketing profession.
Similarly, Samsung jumped from S10 to S20 for the 2020 model year, which makes great sense to consumers despite being nonsequential.
The reason for re-standardization effort was deflection of legal responsibility for misleading marketing:
https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/1852-snow-leopard-changes-th...
If the disk was sold on its power-of-2 capacity, then display the file sizes in their power-of-2 sizes.
On a larger scale, this is a giant mess. Apple is the only one who'd actually try and fix this. Both in terms of power (hardware & software) and in clout.
I'd also add their "bravery", similar to dropping the 3.5mm jack.
I was amused to discover a few years ago when I had to order an E1 network connection at 2 Mbit/s that it was actually 2048000 bit/s, perhaps what you might call a 2 kikbit/s line now-a-days ;-)
