On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 04:07 PM, Dewey wrote:
Yep… and there is also a gibibyte and a tebibyte… who thinks of these
things ???
It comes from hard drive manufacturers and the desire to shave off a bit of size to make some profit. Hard drives are sold by 1000 bytes to the kB instead of 1024 bytes to the kB. As this expands to larger sizes, this allows hard drive (or SSD) manufacturers to sell a 4 TB drive that has 361 GB less storage than expected. At these sizes, that little change from 1024 to 1000 certainly adds up. Windows uses 1024 bytes to the kB (and so on up the chain). That's why when you put in a hard drive in Windows, you see less than expected.
Here is an example. I have three 4 TB drives in a RAID array on my server. Yet these supposedly 4 TB drives (that say 4 TB on the box and label) really just have 3.639 TB of storage. That's 9% shaved off - or 361 GB. That is indeed quite sizable. Across these three drives, the amount of storage that has been shaved off is approximately 1 TB! With three 4 TB drives, I would expect to have 12 TB of storage. Yet I only have 10.9 TB of storage.
When hard drive manufacturers started this nonsense, they used to put fine print on the package saying that they defined a kB (or MB or whatever) as 1000 instead of 1024. Then they got the idea to simply rebrand the measurements so that no fine print was needed. That was certainly evil, but rather ingenious.
This sort of thing unfortunately happens quite often.
TV sets - they are now sold as a 55" class or 65" class; the actual size is smaller
Mass-produced food sold as home-style
In the past, people would shave off parts of silver coins then pass off the remainder. This is why US coins that were silver before 1964 (dime and up) still have reeded edges - with a reeded edge, one could easily discern if the coin had been filed down
And the classic spaghetti sauce example where a jar was 32 oz. for decades. Now the manufacturers have, through the years, shaved off more and more to where the jars are now around 26 oz. My favorite example of this how candy bars have now become so small that there are now two-packs that are pretty much the size of where the candy bars were to begin with.
