Hz are Hz though
8 Hitz = 1 Hert
the drive manufacturer advertises capacity in Terabytes (or Gigabytes) and the operating system displays drive capacity in Tebibytes (or Gibibytes). The former unit is based on 1000 and the latter unit is based on 1024, which lets the drive manufacturer put a bigger number on the product info while technically telling the truth.
I understand why storage manufacturer do this and I think it makes sense. There is no natural law that dictates the physical medium to be in multiples of 2^10. In fact it is also the agreed upon way to tell clock speeds. Nobody complains that their 3 GHz processor only has 2.X GiHz. So why is it a problem with storage?
Btw, if you want to see a really stupid way to "use" these units, check the 3.5" floppy capacity:
The double-sided, high-density 1.44 MB (actually 1440 KiB = 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB) disk drive
So they used 2^10 x 10^3 as the meaning of "M", mixing them within one number. And it's not like this was something off in a manual or something, this was the official capacity.
so why is it a problem with storage?
Because it gets worse with size. 1 KB is just 2.4% less than 1 KiB. But 1 TB is almost 10% less than 1 TiB. So your 12 TB archive drive is less like 11.9 TiB and more like 11 TiB. An entire "terabyte" less.
Btw ISPs do the same.
It's just the agreed metric for all capacities except for RAM. Your Gigabit network card also doesn't transfer a full Gibibit (or 125 Mebibytes) in a single second. Yet nobody complains. Because it's only the operating system manufacturer that thinks his product needs AI that keeps using the prefix wrongly (or at least did, I'm not up to speed). Everyone else either uses SI units (Apple) or correctly uses the "bi"-prefixes.
A twelve core 3 GHz processor is also cheating you out of a 2.4 GiHz core by the same logic. It's not actually 3 x 2^30 Hz.
Data transfers have always been in base 10. And disc manufacturers are actually right. If anything, it's probably Microsoft that has popularised the wrong way of counting data.
It has nothing to do with wanting to make disks be bigger or whatever.
The actual underlying storage is defined by elements which are either 1 and 0. Also there was several decades of time during which which both the people who actually invented and understood the tech used powers of 2 wherein the only parties using powers of 10 were business people trying to inflate the virtue of their product.
Just because the data is stored digitally doesn't mean that it's capacity has to be in powers of two. It just means the possible amount of different data that can be stored is a power of two.
Using SI prefixes to mean something different has always irked me as an engineer.
Also there was several decades of time during which which both the people who actually invented and understood the tech used powers of 2
For permanent storage or network transfer speeds? When was that? Do you have examples?
Yes.
When a drive is close to full capacity, those MBs lost due to units or secondary partitions from the format are the least of the worries. It's time for an additional or larger drive, or look at what is taking so much space.
If it's a SSD, it might. They are overprovisioned for wear-levelling, reducing write amplification, and remapping bad physical blocks.
I wouldn't trust one off of Wish, but any reputable consumer brand will be overpovisioned by 2-8% of the rated capacity. For 1 TB, it would take an entire 9% to match the rated capacity in base-2 data units instead of SI units, but enterprise drives might reach or exceed that figure.
Does anyone ever actually use those prefixes? I've personally just couched the difference into bytes vs bits.
There is also reserve space for replacing bad sectors
Drive manufacturers aren't really at fault here. As long as you use the proper units everything is in order. There is no reason for drives to be an exact power of two, so TiB and 1024 don't really make sense here. The biggest offender and the only big player that still does it wrong is Microsoft by using non-standard units. The history behind the 1000/1024 confusion is IMHO really interesting: https://zeta.one/kilobyte-is-1000-bytes/
Units are important!
oh no
Original black and white NTSC television was 30fps interlaced. You got a half frame, every other scan line, every 60th of a second, so a full field was painted every 30th of a second. Why 30 instead of 24 like film? Because US electrical power is 60Hz. That could be used as a convenient timebase to sync signals with.
Adding color to that existing standard while still maintaining compatibility with existing black and white TVs was doable by very slightly decreasing the frame rate to 29.97, which was within the vertical sync tolerance of a television. worst case scenario you'd have to slightly turn the V Hold knob on the back of the TV set. The only 20th century analog video tech that was truly 60fps color video was VGA, a true RGB signal which AFAIK was never sent over the air.
Dey terk er hertz.
I'd love to know the technical reasoning for this. It probably has to do with clock frequency multipliers like when doing serial comms your baud needs to be pretty close to the spec but it's pretty much never going to be exact.
I've only partially researched this, but I'm pretty sure it's actually an ancient carry over from when NTSC changed to colour. Wikipedia says it switched from 60hz to 59.94 "to eliminate stationary dot patterns in the difference frequency between the sound and color carriers". They just kind of kept doubling it and we ended up with these odd refresh rates, I'm guessing for NTSC TV compatibility.
Someone's never bought a 2x4
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Wait until they find out how much space is on their 2TB SSD...
save