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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)

submitted 11 months ago by wischi to c/[email protected]

219 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

when you format a 256GB drive and find out that you don't actually have 256GB

Most of the time you have at least 256GB. It's just you 256GB=238.4GiB, and windows reports GiB but calls them GB. You wouldn't have that problem in Mac OS that counts GB properly, or gnome that counts GiB and calls them GiB.

(This is ignoring the few MB that takes to format a drive, but that's also space on the disk and you're the one choosing to partition and format the drive. If you dumped a file straight into the drive you'd get that back, but it would be kind of inconvenient)