On Tue, 07 Jan 2025 11:09:06 -0800 Kushal Kumaran <kus...@locationd.net> wrote:
> I point people to http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html which is where I > was first enlightened. Mr. Tarsnap forgets something. The reason disks are addressed in powers of two has to do with mathematics. Every hard and floppy disk out there has flaws. To get around that, data is divided into sectors, and checksums calculated. Done right, this allows for error correction for small flaws. The math works out better if you do it in chunks that are integer powers of two. So floppy disks have sectors of 256 octets, and their attendant checksums. Modern hard drives schlep data in chunks of 4096 (2^12) octets. And bytes these days are eight bits. This business of using powers of ten to describe hard drives came from hard drive marketing weanies. They realized that using powers of ten made their drives *look* larger to the uninitiated. I worked at Maxtor about the time this was happening, and that's what the marketing weanies told me. The marketing weanies used GB for the powers of two numbers and for the powers of ten numbers, which, it it wasn't fraud, skated damned close. Someone since then has come up with GiB, making it possible to distinguish between the two. I don't much care. Americans use both imperial measures (miles) and metric (35 mm film, liter bottles of pop). The agile ones can use both. Mass is mass, whether you measure it in grams or pounds, on the Earth or on Luna. My lathe (Hi, Gene) is calibrated in millimeters: one turn of the handle moves the table 1 mm, and it is graduated in increments of .05 mm. I have both inch and metric taps, dies and drill bits. And lettered drill bits. GB or GiB? I don't care, just be clear which one you are using. Thus ends the rant. -- Does anybody read signatures any more? https://charlescurley.com https://charlescurley.com/blog/
