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Comment by endian | Hacker News Reader

way, way less than 10mhash

s/mhash/Mhash/

that's a bit pedantic, ya know... the number only means something to people who know the system even a little bit, and they'll immediately translate to the proper unit because 10 milli-hashes per second makes no sense. Unless you're mining by hand.

It's like ranting that people talk about "10mb" files. Or "100gb" or "100GB" drives. When they're technically "93.1GiB" drives ("gibibyte" [1],[2], or [3]).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measur... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Ironically - your example speaks against itself. 100GB Drive is a very precise and agreed upon way of referring to a drive - it means 1x10^11 bytes. 93.1 GiB drive is unusual - we don't typically use powers of 2 when referring to drive length - so if you really mean 93.1 GiB, then it's important you call it out as such, or people (storage admins, driver manufacturers, and operating system developers) will understand you to mean 1X10^11 bytes when you say 100 Gigabytes. Precision has it's place.

I thought this was the common way (gibi that is) to refer to harddrives in the OS, I thought that that was the reason harddrives were 100gb when i bought them but only showed up as 93gb on my computer.

It is. Everyone except the hard drive manufacturers uses GiB for technical reasons. Hard drive manufacturers use GB for marketing (and clarity, but mostly marketing) reasons.

It used to be common to speak of sizes in "hard drive megabytes". Eventually, the disk manufacturers won the pointless semantic battle and that went away.

In practice, it matters not in the slightest.

Yet another case where "the common way" is wrong and disgusting. Nothing new here.

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