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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The other peeve of mine with this debacle is that drive capacities using SI units do not use the full available address space (since it’s binary).

The "full available address space" goes down as the drive gets older and bad sectors are removed.

With a good drive, it might take ten or more years before you actually see the "size" of the drive shrink, but that's mostly because you 500GB drive actually had something like 650GB of storage when it was brand new.