In fact the longer people continue to use the old terminology, the longer the hard drive manufacturers have to use the old terminology to rip off consumers. Did you ever wonder why your hard drive isn’t a full 80GiB? That’s because it said 80GB on the box.

Some argue that it makes no sense to have the extra terminology because computers operate using base 2. The problem with this argument is that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures published a paper in 1998 stating that SI prefixes should only be used with powers of 10.

I think anyone familiar with science understands the necessity for proper measurements. Without them, your data is bad. Let me present a quick example. Let’s say you were looking for a place to store copies of your digital movies. Your computer says they are 4.7GB (but it really means GiB), so you decide to get a 1TB hard drive in which you think you can store 1,000 / 4.7 = 212 full movies. However, the 1TB hard drive is really only 909GiB, which means you can only store about 193 movies. If you leave 20% free space to keep performance up, then that’s only 154 movies.

But the data on the hard drive box was not misrepresented, it was misunderstood. The reason it was misunderstood is because the neglect of the standard passes from the programmer to the average user via the software they use. There I said it, it is your fault programmers.

If you think you have a real reason why not to adopt it, please leave a comment.

A quick explanation of the standard, courtesy of wikipedia:

IEEE 1541 recommends:

• a set of units to refer to quantities used in digital electronics and computing:
  • bit (symbol ‘b’), a binary digit;
  • byte (symbol ‘B’), a set of adjacent bits (usually, but not necessarily, eight) operated on as a group;
  • octet (symbol ‘o’), a group of eight bits;
• a set of prefixes to indicate binary multiples of the aforesaid units:
  • kibi (symbol ‘Ki’), 2¹⁰ = 1024;
  • mebi (symbol ‘Mi’), 2²⁰ = 1048576;
  • gibi (symbol ‘Gi’), 2³⁰ = 1073741824;
  • tebi (symbol ‘Ti’), 2⁴⁰ = 1099511627776;
  • pebi (symbol ‘Pi’), 2⁵⁰ = 1125899906842624;
  • exbi (symbol ‘Ei’), 2⁶⁰ = 1152921504606846976;
• that the first part of the binary prefix is pronounced as the analogous SI prefix, and the second part is pronounced as bee;
• that SI prefixes are not used to indicate binary multiples.