HDD sizes

[Mark R]

By convention it has generally only been system RAM that has been measured using binary units, mainly because it is primarily only available in binary multiples due to its design.

For essentially everything else, and that includes clock speeds, network/modem speeds, hard drive/Tape/optical discs capacity/floppy discs/flash memory has all been measured in decimal units by convention.

 

[ZL1]

Originally posted by: Mark R
By convention it has generally only been system RAM that has been measured using binary units, mainly because it is primarily only available in binary multiples due to its design.

For essentially everything else, and that includes clock speeds, network/modem speeds, hard drive/Tape/optical discs capacity/floppy discs/flash memory has all been measured in decimal units by convention.

on the other hand just about every old quantum drive was binary and some newer maxtors (like the 120 I mentioned above)


D

 

[Jeff7]

Matthias99 already covered it pretty well....but it's also in my sig:

Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000
Gibibyte = 1,073,741,824


Kilo, Mega, Giga - all conventional prefixes, powers of ten, so they should apply to computer terms too. I don't know the origins of the binary "kilo" and up, but it probably started in the infancy of computers. Operating systems would probably need a simple patch that tells them what a kilobyte really is.