5 ms·

I don't get the fascination with powers of two in storage. RAM I understand, because you're counting address lines. But storage? What sense does that make?

I don't get the fascination with powers of two in storage. RAM I understand, because you're counting address lines. But storage? What sense does that make? I have an SD card with 16.0 GB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (16.0e3 MB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = 1.42e4 s, or 3.95 hours. Now do the computation with binary units. I have an SD card with 14.9 GiB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (14.9 GiB) * (1e-6 * 1024^3 MB / GiB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = ... Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?

protomyth 11y ago
If its 200Mbytes in RAM, it should be the the same on a disk. Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dietrichepp 11y ago
  > Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. So using sector as a label is just bad practice. And... how does it make the math worse? My hard drive partition has a size of 250140434432 bytes (actual value)... how much is that in GB? Easy, 250.1 GB. For some reason, I was able to do that calculation without the aid of a computer or a calculator. Humans don't count sectors. We like to shift decimal points around. Computers are good at calculation, so we give them the task of multiplying by 512 for us, and displaying measurements in units suitable for human society.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    > Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. Yeah, 512 bytes or, now, 4096 bytes - neither is a power of 10 The math is worse because the computer (address space) and hard drive are actually base 2 and vendors are selling in base 10. This worship of base 10 in every aspect of our lives, even when it doesn't make sense and cheats us out of money, is sad. Computers are base 2, memory is base 2, and storage should be base 2 or else its just a batch of lies. I guess I should be glad the humanity didn't have 11 fingers. The computer is showing you a number, calculating using base 2 will not be any stress on a human since it doesn't show every byte anyway.

protomyth 11y ago

If its 200Mbytes in RAM, it should be the the same on a disk. Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dietrichepp 11y ago
> Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. So using sector as a label is just bad practice. And... how does it make the math worse? My hard drive partition has a size of 250140434432 bytes (actual value)... how much is that in GB? Easy, 250.1 GB. For some reason, I was able to do that calculation without the aid of a computer or a calculator. Humans don't count sectors. We like to shift decimal points around. Computers are good at calculation, so we give them the task of multiplying by 512 for us, and displaying measurements in units suitable for human society.
- protomyth 11y ago
  > Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. Yeah, 512 bytes or, now, 4096 bytes - neither is a power of 10 The math is worse because the computer (address space) and hard drive are actually base 2 and vendors are selling in base 10. This worship of base 10 in every aspect of our lives, even when it doesn't make sense and cheats us out of money, is sad. Computers are base 2, memory is base 2, and storage should be base 2 or else its just a batch of lies. I guess I should be glad the humanity didn't have 11 fingers. The computer is showing you a number, calculating using base 2 will not be any stress on a human since it doesn't show every byte anyway.