Comment on How come manufacturers use base 10 units when calculating the space of a hard drive? Giving you 931GB per TB Hard Drive. Why not advertise the number windows reads?

DaleGribble88@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Marketing says it has 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, aka 1 Trillion bytes. SI unit naming conventions dictate that is 1 Tera-of-bytes.

Computers work with powers of 2 (Like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …), and wouldn’t you know that 2^10 is 1024. So computer scientist will use 1024 as a stand in for Kilobyte because it makes a lot of the math elsewhere much easier.

So, when you buy a 1TB hard drive, the manufacturer is advertising it at 1 Trillion bytes. However, your operating system, like Windows or Linux or MacOS, divides by 1024 when doing the conversion like so: 1 Trillion / 1024 / 1024 / 1024. That works out to just over 931.

To help avoid confusion, the proper term for the 1024 number is a “Kibibyte,” abbreviated KiB, instead of a “kilobyte,” abbreviated KB. Similar names exist for Mebibytes, Gibibytes, Tibibytes and beyond!

TL;DR Your box is measured in TB and your computer measures in TiB because 1st number is bigger and 2nd number is actually useful.

source
Sort:hotnewtop