Tag Archives: IEC

The endless discussion about binary versus decimal prefixes – GB vs GiB

I already wrote about this twice:

  1. My first blog post about the issue
  2. My second blog post

And to fire up the discussion once again, I found another link on the IEC website: http://www.iec.ch/si/binary.htm

Remember that scientists want to be very precise about their findings and writing G, means there’s 1,000,000,000 of whatever they were measuring. If they wanted to switch to counting in binary language, they would either switch to using 0s and 1s or use binary prefixes like Gi, Mi, Pi and Ki.

So once again:

  • 1 kB = 1,000 Bytes
  • 1 KiB = 1,024 Bytes
  • 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes
  • 1 GiB = 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 Bytes

 

Spread the word. Please!

Gigabyte versus Gibibyte

Are the hard drive vendors screwing us?

the answer is no. At least when it comes to the number of bytes they promise you can store on their drives they’re not. Oh really?

In July 2012 I wrote a blog post on “saying what you mean to say“, so people cannot misinterpret what you’re trying to point out. Gigabyte, Gibibyte, Joules, Calorie, kilo Calorie, degrees Celsius, but not degrees kelvin (it’s just kelvin or capital K).

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