At least Apple got on the same page as the HD manufacturers. I think it's the latest Journaled that formats/reads as 1,000MB = 1GB. So your 6TB drive will actually format and read as such.
Yeah. It does seem odd that we started expecting the prefixes to mean something different. The greek prefixes should use their literal meaning. It makes no sense that computer science altered the meaning. Changing the meaning from 10^3 to 2^10 is stupid.
How is it not that simple?
TB != TiB
TB is terabyte and TiB is tebibyte. There is no confusion between the two regardless of what system you subscribe to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte
I agree that the HDD industry probably uses metric for marketing reasons but it's a fundamental fault of every OS that labels TiB as TB. That is plain incorrect whereas TB = TB for hdd manufacturers. The confusion is caused by OSs.
No. You're buying the revisionist history of the storage market. Originally, kilobyte was 2^10 bytes and megabyte was 2^10 kilobytes.
All you need to know in order to tell who is wrong is look at which side has to disclaim how they do their math. Hint: it's not the OSes.
Bingo. A kilobyte was 1024 bytes looooong before drive companies started swindling people.
An even bigger clue is that "tebi-" and "mebi-" are completely made up words.
No. You're buying the revisionist history of the storage market. Originally, kilobyte was 2^10 bytes and megabyte was 2^10 kilobytes.
2^10 bytes has never been a kilobyte in the hard drive industry.
It has always been in the computer industry, which existed long before hard drives were even conceived.
You could really do some research on the web. What I'm saying isn't even controversial.
And as the "IT guy" for everyone I run into, that's always the complaint when people upgrade drives - "the box said X but after I plugged it in it said Y". I mean, just look at the screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/78HlGue.jpg
It's easy to see the reason for the confusion
You're revising history. 2^10 bytes has never been a kilobyte in the hard drive industry.
Oh the revisionist history! How dare hard drive makers use the common usage of the Greek prefixes that the computer industry arbitrarily decided to change.
2000 years before the first byte was even an idea in someone's head, kilo meant 10^3.
What do you have against calling a spade a spade? They didn't do it out of some sense of scientific superiority or love of everything Greek, it was a marketing move to allow them to sell smaller drives as bigger ones as the difference in units would become quite substantial in larger drives.
And nothing in your post refuted my post that it was 2^10 long before it was 1000. So what was your point?
Incorrect. Decimal didn't become the industry standard until 1998. I had a 7gb Seagate drive which used IEC nomenclature.
This page from the PCGuide created in the mid 90's says otherwise:
http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec-c.html
"What's worse is that the percentage discrepancy between the decimal and binary measures increases as the numbers get larger: there is only a 2.4% difference between a decimal and a binary kilobyte, which isn't that big of a deal. However, this increases to around a 5% difference for megabytes, and around 7.5% for gigabytes, which is actually fairly significant. This is why with today's larger hard disks, more people are starting to notice the difference between the two measures. Hard disk capacities are always stated in decimal gigabytes, while most software uses binary. So, someone will buy a "30 GB hard disk", partition and format it, and then be told by Windows that the disk is "27.94 gigabytes" and wonder "where the other 2 gigabytes went". Well, the disk is 27.94 gigabytes--27.94 binary gigabytes. The 2 gigabytes didn't go anywhere."
If you aren't familiar with Charles Kozierok who is the guy that wrote the PC Guide, he has masters degrees in the electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He likely has a pretty good handle on what he is talking about here.
The only change that happened in the hard drive industry in the late 90's was that manufacturers had to start stating they were basing their capacity on 1MB being equal to 1 million bytes. Sort of like when CRT manufacturers had to start listed the viewable screen diagonal along with whatever size they were claiming the monitor was.
Not all of us have to read about it. Some of us lived it.
http://members.optus.net/alexey/prefBin.xhtml
Hint: IEEE published that SI units shouldn't be powers of 2 in 1998 for a reason.
Your contradicting yourself in your posts and your links. I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make anymore.
Before 1998 almost anything went. Some hard drive manufacturers used 2^20 for MB, some used 10^6, others couldn't make up their mind and used 2^10 * 10^3 (really). The same bizzaro 2^10 * 10^3 was widely used for floppy disks.
Interestingly, there was never this controversy with communications - if you bought a 9.6 kbps modem, you got 9600 bps, not 9830 bps. If you had a 10 Mbps LAN, you got 10,000,000 bps.
Same with tape, if you bought a 1 megabit tape for your mainframe, you got 1,000,000 bits - tape was defined in bits per inch, and you'd get 550 feet at 150 bits per inch.
Thankfully, by 1998, standards committees had realised that this could be a problem, and began processes to redefine or clarify the use of various units.
RAM continues to use binary units as a defacto standard, because by its nature, RAM is constructed in powers of two. Some OSs have also been somewhat hesitant to use the redefined units (or simply relabel the units, for the new binary names). So confusion continues to this day.
These arguments are all pretty dumb. Hard Drives used to be measured properly. I bought a 15gig hdd that formatted to 17gigs. That's how it used to be.
Today they could at least give formatted size.
How is that a contradiction? My point was and is that the industry didn't fully get behind kilo, mega, and giga being decimal until 1998.
The whole point to this discussion was a reply to the post which stated that the OS is reporting the size incorrectly when in reality the hard drive industry decided to start calculating hard drive sizes in decimal in 1998. Anyone who was into PC hardware in 1998 would remember that.
Do you really want me to lay out the path in your posts and then your link and point out how many times you have contradicted yourself? Your last point here is still wrong. But there is no further point in arguing it as I don't think anyone here really cares any more, and it has nothing to do with this hot deal. I don't get your continual regurgitating of "everyone alive in 1998, blah blah, blah," spiel either. No one cared about it then, and the fact that nothing has changed since then, indicates that no one cares now either. Well, except for you for some reason.
How is it not that simple?
TB != TiB
TB is terabyte and TiB is tebibyte. There is no confusion between the two regardless of what system you subscribe to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte
I agree that the HDD industry probably uses metric for marketing reasons but it's a fundamental fault of every OS that labels TiB as TB. That is plain incorrect whereas TB = TB for hdd manufacturers. The confusion is caused by OSs.