Thread: I got jipped

WTF. I just bought a "1TB" hard drive, but in fine print it says that it's 1000GB. When did it become alright to pass 1000GB off as 1TB.

isnt one terabyte the same as 1,000gb.

since the SI got involved

Apparently, it was confusing to people that the standard metric multipliers (kilo, mega, giga, etc. - based on 10^3) were being used for binary multipliers (based on 2^10)

it officially changed some years ago
with new prefixes for binary derived values

Kilo = 10^3 = 1,000 = 1kb
Mega = 10^6 = 1,000,000 = 1Mb
Giga = 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 = 1Gb
etc.

Kibi = 2^10 = 1,024 = 1Kib
Mebi = 2^20 = 1,048,576 = 1Mib
Gibi = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 = 1Gib
etc.

I can sort of see their point
Traditionally, a kilobit is only called a kilobit cause it happens to be quite close to the decimal value of kilo - 1000 Vs. 1024

As for the size of disks,
manufacturers did this anyway (even before the new standards)
down the bottom of the box, in fine print was always a disclaimer that numbers were quoted based on decimal notation, not binary

but anyway

Yeah, recently 1 terabyte (TB) has usually meant 1000^4 bytes, while 1 tebibyte (tera binary byte -- TiB) has meant 2^40 or 1024^4 bytes. That's for hard drives. For RAM, people tend to use gigabyte to mean gibibyte or 1024 MiB of RAM.

Another fun fact: it's "gypped," not "jipped," and it's an ethnic slur against the Romany people. Don't worry about it, though, most of them died in the Holocaust.

Dammit, why wasn't I notified. So wait, the 4GB of RAM in my computer is 4 billion bytes? Not 2 ^ 30?

Yeah, and don't forget that formatted it's going to be closer to 930Gb. Definitely somethingto factor in when buying a new HDD.

Out of curiosity, what drive did you get? Also, internal or external? I'm thinking about picking up a 1Tb external drive for my laptop, and have just about settled on a LacIE 301315U1TB for the eSATA/Firewire/USB options.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

Dammit, why wasn't I notified. So wait, the 4GB of RAM in my computer is 4 billion bytes? Not 2 ^ 30?

No,
4Gb RAM = 2^32 bytes

Ram is a collection of binary digits arranged in a square, and therefore has to be (by nature) some power of 2

You cannot get 4 billion bytes of memory, as the square root of 4 billion is not an integer

rotational disks, on the other hand, are a collection of binary digits arranged in concentric circles over many platters, and can be any arbitrary number
There are no geometric constraints on rotational disks