Bits sold as bytes.
It’s actually Gigabytes sold as Gibibytes.
This meme really is just ‘my perspective’ at either end and ‘yours’ in the middle.
It’s “my perspective is right but some people believe it for the wrong reasons”.
Or “there’s a common belief that seems naive as you start looking closer at it, but eventually it turns out to be more accurate than the assumptions someone with a little experience might make”.
You will never hear me say gibibytes in public though. Telling on my nerdy ass self is for private conversations.
Not with that attitude.
The OS uses 1024 and the drive manufacturers are using 1000.
Which is why a 1TB drive shows 931GiB of capacity. (1024 GiB =1 TiB, 1024MiB =1 GiB, 1024KiB =1MiB, 1024 Bytes =1KiB) but the drive manufacturers using SI prefixes doing 1000 Bytes =1 KB, 1000 KB = 1MB, 1000MB = 1GB, 1000GB = 1TB.
Thus the discrepancy.
The problem arises when the OS uses GiB but labels them GB, like Windows does.
No, the problem is making up a new word (gibibyte) and expecting people to use it when there’s already a word for that (gigabyte).
It’s the hard drive manufacturers that should change.
I want to agree with you, but the war is lost. Giga is billion and Gibi is 2^30
I want to agree with you two, because I hate competing standards, but you gotta admit gigabyte was a poor choice from the start because it took the SI prefix and made it mean something else. Creating Gibi is just correcting that mistake
Agreed, metric prefixes should always remain consistent. Computers can read both though, so why doesn’t windows?
I propose a new standard.
Ghibli[byte/bit]s.
… no I will not expand or further clarify.
Yeah:
1000 GB × 1000 × 1000 × 1000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 931.32 GiB
It’s a sufficient explanation. I don’t know why the meme has the highest IQ person say “I don’t know”, unless the joke is that it’s easier than explaining…
I don’t know why the meme has the highest IQ person say
Every time I see the midwit meme format, it reads like OP imagines that they’re the 145 IQ guy who is above it all, when all other evidence suggests that they’re closer to the 55 IQ guy.
I’m guessing that IDK is for why they write it as GB and not GiB
I don’t know why the meme has the highest IQ person say “I don’t know”
that is what happens when 100 iq meme author tries to think like 145 iq person, which is of course impossible by definition…
But the smallprint explanation in the middle of the meme is actually spot on. Whoever made this does know the correct explanation and seemingly also knows that it comes out to 931 GB from the unit conversion alone.
I’m really not sure this meme makes sense. 😅
Because there are other things that change usable space, like file tables, OS stuff, and bad sectors. The unit conversion is the biggest one, but not the only one.
Look at Mr. “100 IQ” over here
128 IQ*
Which itself is for marketing reasons, a manufacturer would find it difficult to compete with others using units that make their drives look larger or cheaper at “same capacity”.
There is also the smaller amount w!ndows will secretly waste for its own pleasure (few GiB iirc). And an even smaller amount that gets wasted in partitioning. Usually around 5MiB, you can reduce it to 16kiB with some manual configuration in gdisk, or you can skip partition tables entirely for some end-game cursedness. And then the filesystem will take some. ext4 takes based on the number of inodes, for large drives that can be tens of GiB. Btrfs takes almost nothing (though in the background allocates in steps of 1GiB, so some tools might show 2GiB used as soon as data is written). Then if you try to sum all files on disk, that will land even lower for many more reasons.
At the beginning of time, K/M/G etc was based on 1024. This was considered a bad move by some people.
What I don’t get is memory packages don’t come in thousands, but in volumes dividable by 1024, so why the 1TB=1000 somethings…
Because back in the 1980s RAM chips were individually sold and the number of address pins exactly matched the 2^(# of pins) amount of memory addresses contained in the chip (for cost savings purposes) and only with the later column strobe addressing DRAM did that change but at that point they couldn’t deviate from the 1024 standard without getting sued (a couple did and went out of business).
And since the RAM chips themselves are stuck using 1024 and the RAM sticks are made of matching RAM chips (for cost and performance reasons); it will remain that way until people start buying systems on a chip with embedded RAM.
And it gets more complicated when we get to the metadata and filesystem structure. So, you technically never get to store 931GB, I wonder what the (average) ratio of metadata to data is? 3:1?
Depends on the file system. If you are using FAT-8; it is 256:1 if you are on ZFS it is as low as 1:4.
It also depends on composition of the data stored. If it is Linux ISOs; it is 4GB:64KB. If it is old C source code; it is 512B:4KB on ext4
I’d just like to point out that while I understand the reason, I’m just not willing to explain that to people anymore in all them words so now I just say IDK
Bootlickers will then argue it’s cool that the manufacturer screws you out of almost a hundred gigs.
The manufacturer is labeling the drive correctly as 1TB (1000GB, 10^(12)B). It’s Microsoft that incorrectly labels it as 931GB; it’s actually 931GiB (931 * 2^(30)B). A Mac will correctly show 1000GB and a Linux machine will correctly show 931GiB.
Linux uses the unit defined by your locale, it may vary
I’ve seen GB sometimes on Linux, but they’re actual GB, not mislabeled GiB, so I don’t have a problem with it.
Told you guys.
“Bootlickers will blame a multi-trillion-dollar company”
Do you know what that word means?
If any company could get away with labelling their product to have 1/10th less and get away with it, they would. Usually consumer rights organisations fight to make it so that you get what is advertised.
The producers are using semantics to give less. I, as a customer want what I have been promised by the label.
If you’re interested in arguing the opposite, you’re anti-customer, and pro-ripoff.
“I don’t understand SI measurements but daddy Gates told me all the others are wrong and he’s the only one who cares for me”
fastfetch output :
Disk (/): 203.45 GiB / 224.94 GiB (90%) - ext4 Disk (/media/skullgrid/Data): 684.44 GiB / 913.43 GiB (75%) - fuseblkI didn’t realise that Linus Torvalds changed his name…
… unless you think I specifically went out and bought a laptop that advertised a 913.43 GiB secondary drive?
since it’s 69GB it’s not cool, it’s nice
They should just be requires to use consistent units of measurement.
Its great when you buy larger capacity drives and start to lose entire terabytes
Technically you dont lose anything. Its like you buy a car with top speed in Kmh, but you see Mph when you drive.
Yeah I know it’s technically the correct use of terabyte vs tebibyte but it still feels bad when your 12TB drive is only 10.9TiB
Well it is too bad the Windows sucks. If only they had the money to make a proper OS that gives you the option to switch from binary to decimal like in Linux.
To make things more confusing, there’s a goofy formula which tells you the actual capacity of a given advertised capacity. A drive advertised as 1 TB will always have exactly 1,000,204,886,016 bytes. It helps to have consistency, but nobody seems to knows where the formula came from.
Slack space for sector remapping maybe? Similar to SSDs being over provisioned.
And with partitions being offset 1MiB from the start of the drive (For alignment), the extra space would help preserve capacity anyway.
That genuinely sounds fascinating, but I can’t click “necessary cookies only” on my phone.
really? i had two 1tb drives (different model) and for some reason their size was slightly different and one was smaller (as in a few bytes?) so i had to shrink the partition size to dd the data over.
Interesting.
The old GiB vs GB
Plus some programs showing space actually usable for your data (not unreasonable from user perspective), which means another chunk is gone as overhead from the file system.
This meme template doesn’t make any sense with regard to the topic. Like, not even a bit.
SSDs also have over-provisioning (which is not a bad thing imo)
It is just greediness.
Has anyone ever used the last byte on any hard disc in a successful manner?
I mean not by just putting a too large file there, but something that actually utilized that final byte and having the machine still run flawlessly?
I mean, it doesn’t? The last few GB get slow.
Be the change you want to see, and report back 😅
I already did it on floppies.
I also attempted to program the entire AD&D rules as an Amiga Basic program. It ran well for a start, but then I noticed that the random generator always returned the same dice rolls. Turned out that the RAM was used up, so it couldn’t store the random value anywhere. The program was fine otherwise. Just out of ram.
Anyway, I miss the ingenuity of having too little space, more than I am impressed with the possibilities of having too much.
People simply did more with less. I want that to return. The bloat is obscene, and hopefully AI is going to break the balloon of it. Nobody really needs several gigabytes of code to run a 2 line program.
I don’t think it would be possible if the machine is running on it, since it would be constantly trying to write logs, and errors would arise when that write operation failed.
Machines also run slower if you’ve used almost all of your disc space, as OSes does RAM data swaps, for data it can’t/won’t hold in memory. Go down to 10 GB of space and your machine is bloody slow
That’s your OS using base 2 units and calling it TB. The drive ships with 1TB.
I really love how this really applied to basically everything, the more you know about Linux for example – the most you are happy that something worked instead of asking HOW it works
I’m talking to you, RAM memory!
FML you’re telling me I need Random Access Memory Memory now? 😩 Never getting a new pc.
is there something wrong with RAM on windows? iirc this was one of the things that worked normally for me.
