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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • The underlying chips certainly are exact powers of two but the drive size you get as a consumer is practically never an exact power of two, that’s why it doesn’t really make sense to divide by 1024.

    The size you provided would be 500107862016 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 465.76174163818359375 GiB

    Divided by 1000³ it would be 500.107862016 GB, so both numbers are not “pretty” and would’ve to be rounded. That’s why there is no benefit in using 1024 for storage devices, even SSDs.

    The situation is a bit different with RAM. 16 “gig” modules are exactly 17179869184 bytes. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=prime+factors+of+17179869184

    So you could say 17.179869184 GB or 16 GiB. Note that those 16 GiB are not rounded and the exact number of bytes for that RAM module. So for memory like caches, RAM, etc. it definitely makes sense to use binary prefixes with 1024 conversion but for storage devices it wouldn’t make a difference because you’d have to round anyway.



  • Thank you for taking the time to read it and your feedback.

    Your replies here come off as pretty condescending.

    That was definitely never my intention but a lot of people here said something similar. I should probably work on my English (I’m not a native speaker) to phrase things more carefully.

    You shouldn’t just say “did you read the article” and then “it’s in this section of the article”

    It never crossed my mind this could be interpreted in a negative way. I tried to gauge if someone read it and still disagreed or if someone didn’t read it and disagrees, because those situations are two different things, at least for me. The hint with the sections was also meant as a pointer because I know that most people won’t read the entire thing but maybe have 5min on their hand to read the relevant section.