wbarnhill
Final Approach
It's kinda disheartening to see this:
In case you haven't slapped your forehead in response to what this guy said, here's a rundown...
Manufacturers of hard drives have, for the longest time, fudged the numbers when it comes to drive capacity. You put a 1TB drive in your computer and it's going to show up as 931GB, and all because of semantics.
Market-speak says that one terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Base 10. Standard human speak.
The problem is that computers don't operate in base 10. They operate in base 2 (binary, ones and zeros). A terabyte to a computer is 2^40, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Since computers use base 2, you can't use 1000 to divide, you have to use the binary "equivalent" which is 2^10, or 1024. If you divide by 1024 four times, you'll see that the 2^40 comes out to 1. That is why the computer would see it as a terabyte. The "pure" one trillion bytes cannot be divided 4 times, and instead ends up as 931 gigabytes (and some change).
Individuals with a "high" level of tech experience should be aware of this fact, and while I dislike the fact that hard drive manufacturers use such marketing techniques, it irks me that someone rates a product low simply because they didn't understand what 1TB meant.
/rant off.
Followed by:
When will people learn that the market-speak for 1TB doesn't match computer-speak for 1TB?
In case you haven't slapped your forehead in response to what this guy said, here's a rundown...
Manufacturers of hard drives have, for the longest time, fudged the numbers when it comes to drive capacity. You put a 1TB drive in your computer and it's going to show up as 931GB, and all because of semantics.
Market-speak says that one terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Base 10. Standard human speak.
The problem is that computers don't operate in base 10. They operate in base 2 (binary, ones and zeros). A terabyte to a computer is 2^40, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Since computers use base 2, you can't use 1000 to divide, you have to use the binary "equivalent" which is 2^10, or 1024. If you divide by 1024 four times, you'll see that the 2^40 comes out to 1. That is why the computer would see it as a terabyte. The "pure" one trillion bytes cannot be divided 4 times, and instead ends up as 931 gigabytes (and some change).
Individuals with a "high" level of tech experience should be aware of this fact, and while I dislike the fact that hard drive manufacturers use such marketing techniques, it irks me that someone rates a product low simply because they didn't understand what 1TB meant.
/rant off.
