How Snow Leopard reports drive capacity | Hacker News Reader

How Snow Leopard reports drive capacity

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6 pointsprofquail11 comments

This has to be the most cheapskate move I have ever seen. Drive manufacturers have been tricking customers with base 10 forever, and now Apple decided to get on board too? What a rotten move. I think a move like this clearly shows the respect that companies feel towards their customers. What's Apple going to do next? Is OS X 10.7 going to keep away the thetans? Is it going to prevent fan death? What other ignorance will they try to capitalize on?

It's a rotten move, but at least we'll have some consistency now, and no longer have the consumer confusion.

I know that HDD capacity and network bandwidth are generally reported in decimal units, but this is the first time I've ever heard of decimal prefixes being used in a logical as opposed to a physical context.

I think it's a terrible idea. This will break capacity calculations for many apps, potentially leading to inconsistency in space and size reporting between different programs running on the same system.

It will also lead to file size confusion when moving files between OSes.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's a lofty wish, but I'd prefer that drive manufacturers switch to base 2. Since it's the basis of digital logic and all.

Do you also think a 2.5 GHz CPU should run at 2.5 * 2^30 clock cycles per second? How about making redefining Gbps ethernet to run at 2^30 bits per second instead of 10^9 bits per second?

There is some justification for measuring RAM in GiB rather than GB: The design of RAM chips makes this far more convenient. But there's no reason for anything else to be measured in "binary" capacities.

Well, I could see why they used base 10 for magnetic hard drives (since there aren't a power-of-two number of storage spaces available), but what about SSD's, which are best accounted for in base 2?

Also, the GPU and ethernet argument is off base (no pun intended); CPU speed (in Hz) is based in units of s^-1, so it wouldn't make any sense to redefine that in base 2. Ethernet speeds should probably have been measured in base 2, but the numbers are so widespread now it would be confusing to change it.

Because SSDs compete with spinning HDs, and are already at cost-per-byte and available-sizes disadvantages, they're unlikely to embrace a different unit that makes them look even smaller and more expensive in comparison to HDs.

I just wish the entire industry would pick one measure and stick with it.

Or at least be precise about which unit is being used where, by using the 'binary prefixes' system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

4GB (SI) == 3.7GiB (binary)

It's probably a silly personal bias, but I will never be able to bring myself to pronounce out loud the words "gibibyte", "tebibyte", or even "mebibyte". I will actually say "binary gigabyte" before I say "gibibyte".

what would happen if you format the drive into multiple partitions?

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