On ‘Real’ Math vs ‘Fake’ Math by HMX
How hard drive space has been a contentious issue for quite a while. The issue is that when one purchases a 500GB or worse, a 2TB hard drive, they get home only to discover that their new drive shows up as anything but what it is listed as. Some attribute this to hard drive manufactures using ‘fake’ – or base 10 – math to accurately represent the metric kilo, mega, giga and tera prefixes. The confusion comes from the historic fact that at one point in time 210, a value of 1024, was approximated with the metric kilo prefix. As I’m sure you are well aware, 1000(or 103 as implied by kilo) ≠ 1024(210). When it was first used, the error involved ~2.34%. For an 80MB hard drive, this was acceptable. As hard drives increased into the 100s, 1000s and 1000000s of MBs, the error involved in this historic approximation became more and more pronounced as manufacturers stuck to the strict SI definition of each prefix while operating systems continued to rely upon base 2, or binary, definitions. (more…)
