what's 1GB equal to?

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
No. 1024 base 2 = 1000 base 10.

Maybe it's late and I'm just not understanding your point.

1 kilobyte is one thounsand bytes in base-10. That same quantity is 1111101000b or just under 2^10 in binary, which everyone knows.

My point is that, since giga- means one billion, or 10^9 in base-10, gigabyte means 10^9 bytes.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
No. 1024 base 2 = 1000 base 10.

Maybe it's late and I'm just not understanding your point.

1 kilobyte is one thounsand bytes in base-10. That same quantity is 1111101000b or just under 2^10 in binary, which everyone knows.

My point is that, since giga- means one billion, or 10^9 in base-10, gigabyte means 10^9 bytes.

Only in base 10. With computers we aren't dealing with base 10, we're dealing with base 2.
1000 base 10 = 1111101000 base 2. Add up 1111101000 correctly, and (by my quick calculations ) you come up with 1023. You can change base 10 (decimal) to base 2 (binary) in MS calculator with the click of a radial button. It's possible in bc if you're in Linux at the moment, but I forget how to do it off hand.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Only in base 10. With computers we aren't dealing with base 10, we're dealing with base 2.
1000 base 10 = 1111101000 base 2. Add up 1111101000 correctly, and (by my quick calculations ) you come up with 1023. You can change base 10 (decimal) to base 2 (binary) in MS calculator with the click of a radial button. It's possible in bc if you're in Linux at the moment, but I forget how to do it off hand.

Huh?

Here's what you've got going on with 1111101000b:

2^9:1
2^8:1
2^7:1
2^6:1
2^5:1
2^4:0
2^3:1
2^2:0
2^1:0
2^0:0

Now, 2^3+2^5+2^6+2^7+2^8+2^9 is 1000 either way you slice it. I don't see how you're adding 1111101000b and getting 1023d.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Google knows all... even when it's wrong.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Only in base 10. With computers we aren't dealing with base 10, we're dealing with base 2.
1000 base 10 = 1111101000 base 2. Add up 1111101000 correctly, and (by my quick calculations ) you come up with 1023. You can change base 10 (decimal) to base 2 (binary) in MS calculator with the click of a radial button. It's possible in bc if you're in Linux at the moment, but I forget how to do it off hand.

Huh?

Here's what you've got going on with 1111101000b:

2^9:1
2^8:1
2^7:1
2^6:1
2^5:1
2^4:0
2^3:1
2^2:0
2^1:0
2^0:0

Now, 2^3+2^5+2^6+2^7+2^8+2^9 is 1000 either way you slice it. I don't see how you're adding 1111101000b and getting 1023d.

This will teach me to watch tv, work, and post about math at the same time.

We're still converting to base 10 when we add them back up.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: AyashiKaibutsu
base two is binary. 1024 decimal/base 10 = 1000000000 binary/base 2. That's why computers work in powers of two they make nice numbers in binary.

1000 in binary/base 2 = 1111101000
If you add 1111101000 in binary correctly, it should come out to about 1023.

What are you adding together? 1023 decimal is equal to 111111111 binary. So you would need to do 1111101000+10111 to get 1023 decimal. but I still don't see what point your trying to make.
Computer scientists made there own scheme for kilo, mega, etc. It's not SI standard. kilo is 2^10 decimal for computer purposes. Harddrive manufacturers use SI system for measuring to inflate the size of the drives.

 

[Chaotic42]

I should note that when I say "What you've got going on with 1111101000b", I mean what it actually is, not what *you've* got going on. Sorry, I type the way that I speak and it comes out awkwardly sometimes.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: AyashiKaibutsu

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: AyashiKaibutsu
base two is binary. 1024 decimal/base 10 = 1000000000 binary/base 2. That's why computers work in powers of two they make nice numbers in binary.

1000 in binary/base 2 = 1111101000
If you add 1111101000 in binary correctly, it should come out to about 1023.

What are you adding together? 1023 decimal is equal to 111111111 binary. So you would need to do 1111101000+10111 to get 1023 decimal. but I still don't see what point your trying to make.
Computer scientists made there own scheme for kilo, mega, etc. It's not SI standard. kilo is 2^10 decimal for computer purposes. Harddrive manufacturers use SI system for measuring to inflate the size of the drives.

Like I said, I'm trying to do too many things at once. Animal planet or whatever I'm watching has some neat things on "nightmare creatures," so I'm a bit distracted. I screwed up there.

1GB of memory is 1024MB. 1GB of hard disk, no matter what the manufacturers say, is 1024MB.
about.com
t3 shopper
whatis.com (megabyte) -This one is kind of neat. Depending on the source the answer is different. IBM says: According to the IBM Dictionary of Computing, when used to describe disk storage capacity and transmission rates, a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes in decimal notation. But ESR and Microsoft agree: According to the Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary, a megabyte means either 1,000,000 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes.
According to Eric S. Raymond in The New Hacker's Dictionary, a megabyte is always 1,048,576 bytes on the argument that bytes should naturally be computed in powers of two.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
I should note that when I say "What you've got going on with 1111101000b", I mean what it actually is, not what *you've* got going on. Sorry, I type the way that I speak and it comes out awkwardly sometimes.

I understood.

Over all, it doesn't look like everyone can agree on anything. I'll continue to say it's 1024, since historically that's been what it is in computer terms.

 

[Pariah]

1GB is 1000MB and 1024MB. Neither one is wrong, and there isn't just one correct definition. It all depends on the application. Hard drive storage has always been in decimal. Long before PC's were around. The choice isn't some sort of conspiracy theory by HD makers as some people seem to think. It's always been that way. MS doesn't define what a GB is equal to, all it does it report what the hardware tells it. The system BIOS determines the capacity of the drive which eventually gets passed on to the OS. If there any x86 OS that takes the BIOS capacity and converts it to decimal? I'm not aware of one.

All data transmissions are decimal because the transfers are tied to a clock rate which obviously isn't binary. So claiming that 1GB flat out equals 1024MB is not correct, as there are real world computer applications where 1GB does not equal 1024MB besides just HD capacity.

Simple example:

32bit 33MHz PCI, 133MB/s? Only if you use decimal.

4bytes * 33.333Mhz = 133.3333 million bytes

133.33 million / 1048576bytes = 127.2MB

When have you ever seen the PCI bus throughput defined as 127MB/s?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Using two standards just confuses things. Maybe it should be 127MB/s. But I'll go along with the "it's different for different things" idea.

 

[NightCrawler]

Metric vs Binary

Marketing ploy use whichever one is bigger

OK now let's discuss the short ton vs the long ton

 

[slurmsmackenzie]

two plus two is four.....

so by those calculations....uh...we get....ummm

someone help me out here

 

[Jeff7]

Don't blame Microsoft, almost ALL computer users consider a gigabyte to be 2^30, the ones that don't are just being pedantic. The gibi/mebi/kibi/etc prefixes were created by anal-retentive scientists who were pissed off that computer users were using the SI prefixes improperly. Gibi stands for giga-binary and so on and so forth.

And there you have the source of all this confusion. If we're using the prefixes, kilo, mega, giga, then we should use them according to what those prefixes stand for. If you're saying a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, then you (the computer user) have redefined the meaning of the prefix "kilo". You'd be at fault, not the "anal-retentive scientists." Maybe it'd be nice if everybody would adopt the "gigabyte=1 billion bytes" rule, and forget all that base-2 stuff, or else leave it to the people who are in the know about mebabytes and gibibytes.

 

[sunase]

If we're using the prefixes, kilo, mega, giga, then we should use them according to what those prefixes stand for. If you're saying a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, then you (the computer user) have redefined the meaning of the prefix "kilo".

It's worth pointing out that a byte is not an SI unit so the definition you seem to think overrides everyone else's (that of the SI system/metric system) doesn't even apply. You should stop measuring in bytes if you like their way so much. ^^

 

[CQuinn]

This thread is the first I've heard of gibi.... and I'm a third year computer science major....

Its been floating around these boards for a few years now, maybe you were too busy with tests to
notice?

Hard drive manufacturers use base 10 for some unknown reason (probably to inflate the sizes they report).

Maybe because physical capacity = areal density * area of platter * number of platters. Which
is a lot easier to calculate in base10 notation.

One byte is 8 bits.

That has not always been the case.

 

[futuristicmonkey]

K, since no one else has said it yet, I'll say it now. Say you buy a 160 gigabyte hard drive. You are actually paying for 160,000,000,000 bytes. But, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes and not 1000 (which almost everyone here has already said). Anyways, becuase of this difference, you end up with 149 GBs of space instead of the 160GBs you thought you paid for. It's like buying apples (for example) by the amount of atoms total in the bag (a little out there, yes, but I think it might be a reasonable analogy) instead of how many apples there are in the bag.You may buy trillions of atoms worth of apples but in reality, you are only buying like 100 (I don't know how many atoms there are in apples, please don't be mad ) apples.

 

[stickybytes]

in windows, 1 gb= 1024mb

I learned that first hand when i was partitioning my hard drive. I wanted to partition a 20 gig and i entered 20000. Then i wondered why windows views the drive as 19 point something gigs. So as a general tip, when partitioning, take 1024 and multiply it by the number of gigs you want to allocate to the partition.