Why do drive manufacturers advertise drive capacities in GB/TB when OSs and other programs use GiB/TiB?

[Quinnell]

Marketing, probably.  Either way, it's annoying.

[WereCatf]

38 minutes ago, Metallic-Lighght said:

This seems like a very minor problem, but ever since i found that out from the video I have linked in my other comment, I am just a little mad that this stupid mess even exists. 

May I add some more gasoline to the fire? Have you noticed that e.g. Kingston manufactures both SSDs and RAM-sticks, but they use 2-base for RAM and 10-base for SSDs! And yet again, e.g. Samsung produces NAND-cells used in SSDs and Samsung reports NAND-sizes in 2-base and yet they report their SSDs that use those same cells in 10-base!

[Godlygamer23]

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

huh, win 10 does it afaik

Indeed it does. Windows 7 does as well. You can prove this by converting your drive's storage over to gibibytes, and comparing it to the size of your partition(assuming you have a single one. If not, just add the two together). They'll be the same, minus a couple hundredish megabytes due to formatting. 

[Godlygamer23]

I don't think it's a case of "why do drive manufacturers do this when OSes and software do that". Mac OS doesn't measure in base 2 AFAIK. It measures in base 10, which is what drive manufacturers do. They chose one way, and Microsoft chose another way. I don't know the history of all that though.

[Moonzy]

1 hour ago, WereCatf said:

they use 2-base for RAM

because those chiplets are based on base 2

imagine calling 8gb sticks 7.6GB, ugly af

 

tl;dr, just deal with it, it's better than mixing up b and B in spec sheets

[Godlygamer23]

2 hours ago, Kanna said:

Ohh that's why it answers 2 of my questions where I've seen that some older os had a setting or something similar, and why it shows as smaller

I've seen on Anandtech(don't remember which article) where someone claimed that drive manufacturers falsely advertise drive capacities because of how it's reported in Windows, not realizing that Windows reports in base 2, and drive manufacturers use base 10. 

[Metallic-Lighght]

16 hours ago, Felix Huang said:

When I first learned to use a computer, circa 1990s, KB/MB/GB always represented the 10/20/30th power of base 2. TIme moves thing a lot..

Same here. When I learnt about file sizes, 1KB was 1024 bytes; 1MB was 1024KB; 1GB was 1024MB and 1TB was 1024GB.

[Doobeedoo]

It was always fairly annoying. When I have 1TB drive I want it to actually show 1TB and be usable as such. Or just increase the base capacity to counter this kind of measurements. I just feel robbed. 

[Godlygamer23]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

It was always fairly annoying. When I have 1TB drive I want it to actually show 1TB and be usable as such. Or just increase the base capacity to counter this kind of measurements. I just feel robbed. 

But the feeling is not based on anything logical because you're not actually getting robbed. It's just being measured differently.

 

From a technical perspective though, you don't get to use all of the space as some of it goes towards formatting. 

[Doobeedoo]

33 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

But the feeling is not based on anything logical because you're not actually getting robbed. It's just being measured differently.

 

From a technical perspective though, you don't get to use all of the space as some of it goes towards formatting. 

Yeah, I'm aware of that. Though it's still scuffed in the end. The 'some of it goes towards formatting' is really not some, it's a big part. Would be great to have actual 1024GB usable space, not ~100GB less.

[Elad.Evron]

On 10/15/2020 at 9:38 PM, EpiCheeseTime said:

GB and TB are in base 10 whereas GiB and TiB are in 2. Easier to calculate for people on the fly to understand.

Plus XiB is bits and XB is bytes. There are 8 bits per byte.

 

Its also the same for networking. most companies say MegaBytes per second but any speed test or anything that shows speed is MegaBits per second

thats technically not true, 1TB is 1024 GB, one GB is 1024 MB. 

[Elad.Evron]

On 10/15/2020 at 9:34 PM, Metallic-Lighght said:

This question was inspired by a certain Technology Connections  video saying that OSs use GiB or TiB but drive manufacturers use GB or TB. Why don't they advertise the capacities of the drives using the same way that programs use?

Because you can round those up to whole numbers more ealy without "laying" to bad about the real capacity even though 512 and 256 are a thing so IDK

[pythonmegapixel]

29 minutes ago, Elad.Evron said:

thats technically not true, 1TB is 1024 GB, one GB is 1024 MB. 

No. This is the entire point.

 

1 kilobyte (correctly abbreviated to KB) = 1000 bytes

1 kibibyte (correctly abbreviated to KiB) = 1024 bytes

 

Often KB is used to refer to either, which is confusing.

[Elad.Evron]

1 minute ago, pythonmegapixel said:

No. This is the entire point.

 

1 megabyte (correctly abbreviated to MB) = 1000 bytes

1 mebibyte (correctly abbreviated to MiB) = 1024 bytes

 

Often MB is used to refer to either, which is confusing.

Oh, in that case then everything is the goverment making companies use those confusing terms and stuff like that so they could ingrain those very specific numbers in your brain so you would pick up the suttle (but very effective) "mind controling" queues we have in scociaty that make us act in the, if you think abuut it, not ligical way of scociaty we have so they can keep thier galactic status which we are not aware they have and keep touring around the galaxy and have very fun life while we all die from a thing that is literaly more then a trilion times smaller then us. 

doesnt it all make sense to you?!?!?!? 

[pythonmegapixel]

3 minutes ago, Elad.Evron said:

Oh, in that case then everything is the goverment making companies use those confusing terms and stuff like that so they could ingrain those very specific numbers in your brain so you would pick up the suttle (but very effective) "mind controling" queues we have in scociaty that make us act in the, if you think abuut it, not ligical way of scociaty we have so they can keep thier galactic status which we are not aware they have and keep touring around the galaxy and have very fun life while we all die from a thing that is literaly more then a trilion times smaller then us. 

doesnt it all make sense to you?!?!?!? 

I have literally no clue what you're talking about.

 

The existence of two different units to measure the same thing has literally nothing to do with whether the governments of the world do or do not wish to indoctrinate us to behave in a brainwashed manner.

 

(By the way I made an error in my previous post. I should have said kilobyte and kibibyte but accidentally typed megabyte and mebibyte. I have corrected this error)

[Elad.Evron]

8 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

No. This is the entire point.

 

1 megabyte (correctly abbreviated to MB) = 1000 bytes

1 mebibyte (correctly abbreviated to MiB) = 1024 bytes

 

Often MB is used to refer to either, which is confusing.

well actually no one uses what you would say is megabyte to describe mebibyte because mebibyte sounds dumb and the 1024 system is fully integrated in the PC world from marketing to the OS and even in x86 sources. yes sometimes companies will say 1TB and advertise it as 1000BG thats because its a round munber and usually the 24 part or the unround part of the bytes are used as backup and not showen so they really arent lying 

[Godlygamer23]

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Yeah, I'm aware of that. Though it's still scuffed in the end. The 'some of it goes towards formatting' is really not some, it's a big part. Would be great to have actual 1024GB usable space, not ~100GB less.

It's not 100GB less. It's not less space at all. I'll give you an example.

 

My 1TB hard drive shows up as 931GB in Windows.

Spoiler

To the unaided eye, you might think that 69GB is "lost" or being consumed by formatting. In reality, if you understand how Windows measures capacity, that 931GB is actually in gibibytes, not gigabytes. So if you convert 931GiB to GB, you get a value of 999.653. The rest is from formatting.

 

[Elad.Evron]

1 minute ago, pythonmegapixel said:

I have literally no clue what you're talking about.

 

The existence of two different units to measure the same thing has literally nothing to do with whether the governments of the world do or do not wish to indoctrinate us to behave in a brainwashed manner.

 

(By the way I made an error in my previous post. I should have said kilobyte and kibibyte but accidentally typed megabyte and mebibyte. I have corrected this error)

I also have no clue what I was talking about but its funny you got to admit, i just gave you a better answer so you can look at it if you want my real answer

[Doobeedoo]

4 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

It's not 100GB less. It's not less space at all. I'll give you an example.

 

My 1TB hard drive shows up as 931GB in Windows.

  Hide contents

To the unaided eye, you might think that 69GB is "lost" or being consumed by formatting. In reality, if you understand how Windows measures capacity, that 931GB is actually in gibibytes, not gigabytes. So if you convert 931GiB to GB, you get a value of 999.653. The rest is from formatting.

 

Funny my 1TB HDD is 929GB heh. But yeah I know what you're trying to say, it's just that it's unnecessary mess how it's calculated/shown in the end. It's not uniformed, some software or whatever calculate different and stuff. Say a game is for example 1TB it won't fit on the 1TB drive. I'm still surprised this carries onward and that they haven't changed this though. HDD manufacturers use power of 1000 while Windows uses power of 1024 so does RAM manufacturers no. So decimal vs binary system. It's just messy.