Re: Question: SSD speed
On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 01:27:15PM -0500, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
Well, what, really, is wrong with pedantry?
It makes conversation with humans harder with no corresponding benefit.
Not only that, but the discrepancy grows exponentially with the order
of magnitude. The difference between 1 KB and 1 KiB is only 24 bytes,
or 2.4%. The difference between 1 TB and 1 TiB is 9.9%, which is
getting to be pretty significant. That, not to mention the fact 93
GiB is a pretty good chunk of storage.
And how, exactly, does that matter? If you're on your own system and
looking at output from the same set of programs the units don't actually
matter at all--you could look and see that you need one foosbit of space
and have two foosbits and be fine. Units only really matter if you're
talking to someone else or otherwise taking information out of its
original context. But I can't even think of a situation where I needed
to tell someone on a mailing list that I had n TsomethingBsomething of
space. Context is important. Within the context we're discussing, rough
order of magnitude is more than precise enough. For humans a 5.4TB drive
and a 4.9TiB drive both round to 5T. Relative values are generally much
more important in this context: what percentage of the drive is used?
what's the rate of consumption? Can debian 11 fit on a 5T drive? If
you operate in some domain where you need much more precision then go
ahead and do you, but it pretty much certainly isn't going to be on
debian-user.
At any rate here's the cold hard truth: even if you are exchanging
information and it needs to be precise, humans being what they are it
won't help you one bit if you're personally pedantic about MiB vs Mb
because *you can't assume the other side means the same thing*. You'll
have to establish a baseline in every situation where it matters. But in
a situation where it doesn't matter, doing so is just a waste of
time--it won't change the world or human nature.
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