




In a statement to DailyTech earlier today, the company claimed:

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RE: Still annoying
By PrinceGaz on 1/5/2007 8:44:55 AM , Rating: 2
Hard-drive manufacturers (and also optical disk manufacturers since DVD days) are sticking with the decimal prefixes and it would be disadvantageous for any of them to switch to using the binary prefixes, so we'll just have to get used to converting them correctly.

One slight point is that 1TB / 1000GB (decimal) is actually only about 931GB (binary).

It'll be even more fun once drives are large enough for their binary size in Windows and other OSs to be reported as TB rather than GB as there'll be a further discrepancy in sizes. A 2TB drive would actually appear as about 1.82TB (nearly 10% less than the binary size!)

RE: Still annoying

RE: Still annoying
By Oregonian2 on 1/5/2007 2:51:26 PM , Rating: 2
There's no particular reason I can think of why a disk drive needs to be described using binary sorts of sizing. Memory yes, because it's accessed using a binary address. But drives aren't addressed in that manner and could just as well be "regular" sorts of kilo/mega/giga.

It's kind of like flash where NOR-flash is necessarily binary-addressed, while NAND-flash (although are still described by binary sorts of sizing) are addressed through file-system sorts of attributes like hard drives (and historically had lots of bad-blocks and the like which is why the actual sizes weren't what was written on them -- and in fact some NAND-flash modules even now say this very thing in the fine print, especially the cheaper brands).

(NAND flash is the kind in digital cameras, iPods, etc. and are file-system devices while NOR-flash act (roughly) as non-volatile RAM memory)


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