… except for hard drives, and DVDs, and tape drives, and older floppy drives, and networking speeds, and processor speeds, …

“the rip-off factor, in other words”

What a bunch of baloney.

Hard drives have always been measured in correct power-of-10 units. The first hard drive ever sold was the IBM 350 RAMAC in the 1950s. It featured 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric 7-bit characters. I’m not seeing a connection to powers of two, are you? Through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, hard drives continued to be measured in powers of 10, as they are today. Operating systems that used “binary K” like CP/M and DOS didn’t even come out until the 70s.

Early floppy drives (8-inchers) were also measured in decimal kbytes and megabits. Meanwhile, your 56K modem was 56,000 bits per second, not 57,344. Today, your Ethernet connection is 100,000,000 bits per second, not 104,857,600. Your MP3 files are 128,000 bps, not 131,072. Your 50 GB Blu-Ray disc holds about 50,000,000,000 bytes, not 53,687,091,200. The ONLY thing that’s inherently powers of two is memory. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it, because all I’ve seen is complaints of fraud against drive manufacturers with no evidence to back it up.

The problem isn’t deceitful marketing; it’s Microsoft. What conceivable benefit is there to reporting a 100,000,000,000 byte drive as “93 GB” in one place and “95,367 MB” in another place? None. Microsoft’s notation is stupid and useless. Western Digital was absolutely correct in their response to getting sued:

‘Surely Western Digital cannot be blamed for how software companies use the term “gigabyte”—a binary usage which, according to Plaintiff’s complaint, ignores both the historical meaning of the term and the teachings of the industry standards bodies. In describing its HDD’s, Western Digital uses the term properly. Western Digital cannot be expected to reform the software industry. … Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a “dozen,” because some bakers would view a “dozen” as including 13 items.’ http://paulhutch.com/wordpress/?p=214

Using “G-” to mean “1,073,741,824″ is just wrong, plain and simple.

Everyone who has ever purchased a hard drive finds out the hard way that there are two ways to define a gigabyte.   When you buy a “500 Gigabyte” hard drive, the vendor defines it using the decimal powers…

The upshot is that anybody hoping to make themselves clear must define their terms every single time, not just dive in with a blithe assumption that other people will understand the way they happen to do it.

I wrote about this in the very first Dan’s Data letters column.

Have long wind edly said that, my point was that back in the day we actually cared about the block size of the partition, so that the partition that I stored all my BS 2k docs on would be a 600 mb partition with a .5k block size, and the partions that I set up for photoshop skratch disk and Video Capture would have the max block size, (32k or 64k) depending on what hard drive formatting utility was in use.
We were using FWB Hard Disk Toolkit and RAID toolkit back in 1990-92. so if I saved a 2k file on the partition with 64k block size, it would take up 64k. Again that was back when we cared and actually controlled all processes and applications on our EXPENSIVE little macs. QUADRA 640av….blog…blah blog a blam!

PEACE no warts on rolling logs peas in yurtz

ERic PIt Crew out :-)

I remember reading a post by someone about this and they stated that prior to the 100Mb Drive, disk sizes were accurate. It was the maker of the first “100Mb” Disk that broke the rule, it was probably because they were short by a little, and someone suggesting using 1000 bytes to the kilobyte system as a way around it.

James

And don’t get me started on PSU ratings.

Their job is to be as kind to their product’s capabilities as possible, and our job call bullshit on it.

That said… you can blame this on the same short-sighted techies from days of yore who never thought code would still be in use by Y2K, and certainly not by orders of magnitude more machines than existed when they wrote it. The 1024 = 1000 approximation is the same kind of sloppiness. Fortunately, the decimal/binary SI distinction is mostly just cosmetically irritating. It would be nice if Google would add the binary SI prefixes to Google Calculator, though.

However, DVDs do, in fact, cheat us. A single layer dvd holds 4,700,000,000 Bytes and a dual layer 8,500,000,000 Bytes. 4.38GB and 7.91GB respectively.

It looks like an easy way to gain marketshare and I think that the hard drive platters probably have that much space on them right now anyway, just it isn’t all being used.

Also, a while back there was a class action suit filed in the US for buyers of WD hard drives claiming that the size advertised wasn’t correct. Surprisingly, the court actually upheld the complaint and awarded damages; people affected got to download a data backup program that usually cost something like $39 for free from WD. In other words, the compensation was pretty much worthless and hardly anyone would have actually taken the offer up.