this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Wait until they find out how much space is on their 2TB SSD...
That difference is because the drive manufacturer advertises capacity in Terabytes (or Gigabytes) and the operating system displays drive capacity in Tebibytes (or Gibibytes). The former unit is based on 1000 and the latter unit is based on 1024, which lets the drive manufacturer put a bigger number on the product info while technically telling the truth. The drive does have the full advertised capacity.
Hz are Hz though
I understand why storage manufacturer do this and I think it makes sense. There is no natural law that dictates the physical medium to be in multiples of 2^10. In fact it is also the agreed upon way to tell clock speeds. Nobody complains that their 3 GHz processor only has 2.X GiHz. So why is it a problem with storage?
Btw, if you want to see a really stupid way to "use" these units, check the 3.5" floppy capacity:
So they used 2^10 x 10^3 as the meaning of "M", mixing them within one number. And it's not like this was something off in a manual or something, this was the official capacity.
Because it gets worse with size. 1 KB is just 2.4% less than 1 KiB. But 1 TB is almost 10% less than 1 TiB. So your 12 TB archive drive is less like 11.9 TiB and more like 11 TiB. An entire "terabyte" less.
Btw ISPs do the same.
It's just the agreed metric for all capacities except for RAM. Your Gigabit network card also doesn't transfer a full Gibibit (or 125 Mebibytes) in a single second. Yet nobody complains. Because it's only the operating system manufacturer that thinks his product needs AI that keeps using the prefix wrongly (or at least did, I'm not up to speed). Everyone else either uses SI units (Apple) or correctly uses the "bi"-prefixes.
A twelve core 3 GHz processor is also cheating you out of a 2.4 GiHz core by the same logic. It's not actually 3 x 2^30 Hz.
Data transfers have always been in base 10. And disc manufacturers are actually right. If anything, it's probably Microsoft that has popularised the wrong way of counting data.
It has nothing to do with wanting to make disks be bigger or whatever.
Why is it the wrong way when its the way the underlying storage works?
Underlying storage doesn't actually care about being in powers of 2^10 or anything, it's only the controllers that do, but not the storage medium. You're mixing up the different possibilities to fill your storage with (which is 2^(number of bits)).
Looking at triple layer cell SSDs, how would you ever reach a 2^10, a 2^20 or 2^30 capacity when each physical cell represents three bits? You could only do multiples of three. So you can do three gibibytes, but that's just as arbitrary as any other configuration.