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Re: OT - Convert output of byte count to GB count?



Jerry Stuckle a écrit :
> On 2/16/2013 1:37 AM, Richard Hector wrote:
>> Powers of 2 make sense when you're talking about RAM, where the modules
>> have a certain number of binary address lines, so they naturally fall on
>> those boundaries.
>>
>> For disks, there's no particular advantage, and manufacturers generally
>> use proper prefixes. For network bandwidth, there's even less advantage,
>> and 'binary' prefixes are hardly ever used.
> 
> Incorrect.  Disks still use powers of 2 - 512 bytes per sector, for 
> instance.

Big deal. The sector size is 2^9 bytes, but the sector count is a
totally arbitrary number, and is orders of magnitude bigger. So the
binary nature of the sector size is completely invisible in the disk
capacity. Even SSDs or other flash storage don't have a binary capacity
even though they are made of flash chips which have a binary capacity.

> As I said before - back in the 80's, some manufacturers 
> started using 1,000 for 1K instead of 1,024 because it made their disks 
> look larger.  The same is true with bandwidth - it makes the link look 
> faster.

Maybe there is another reason than make figures look bigger : SI decimal
prefixes have a legal value in many countries.


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