jerryc41 wrote:
This didn't make the trip to my earlier post.
[/i]"Many people are confused when their operating system reports, for example, that their new 1 Terabyte (1 TB, or 1000 GB) hard drive is reporting only about 931 gigabytes (GB) in usable capacity. Several factors may come into play when you see the reported capacity of a disk drive. Unfortunately, there are two different number systems which are used to express units of storage capacity; binary, which says that a kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes, and decimal, which says that a KB is equal to 1000 bytes."[/i]
"To a hard disk manufacturer, one KB is 1000 bytes, one MB is 1000 KB, and one GB is 1000 MB. Essentially, if a hard disk is advertised as 500GB, it contains 500 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 500,000,000,000 bytes of space. The hard disk manufacturer thus advertises the disk as a 500 GB hard disk.
However, manufacturers of RAM don’t sell it in even groups of 1000 – they use groups of 1024. When you’re buying memory, a KB is 1024 bytes, a MB is 1024 KB, and a GB is 1024 MB. To work back from the 500,000,000,000 bytes."
This didn't make the trip to my earlier post. br ... (
show quote)
In the olden days (before a computer could sit on a desk), decimal numbering reigned. The capacity of an IBM 7080 was touted as being 150,000 characters and that number was accurate. The machine also did decimal arithmetic. When everything turned binary, it became possible for the marketeers to confuse people by using the values differently and not divulging which base, 10 or 2, they were using.