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Is anyone really surprised? HDD manufacturers have been misleading consumers since they all started advertising kilobytes as 1000 bytes

• ratsmack 6y ago
  This is the one thing that has rustled my jimmies every time I have had to deal with it. They could have easily had marketing jargon for the general consumer and then left the real specification number in generally accepted computing values. This is the kind of stuff that happens when marketing and accounting take over and start running the engineering departments.
• aaronmdjones 6y ago
  A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A kibibyte is 1024 bytes. Windows measures in kibibytes but then says the result in kilobytes, making it look less than it is, i.e. if you connect a 1000 GB (931 GiB) drive to a Windows machine, it will tell you that it's 931 GB. It isn't. You're getting every byte you paid for. Other operating systems don't lie to you.
• acdha 6y ago
  It wasn’t just marketing. Historically, a kilobyte was 1024 bytes in memory contexts where everything was based on powers of two but nowhere else. This was obviously confusing because everywhere else used kilo as 1000 — a 420MB hard drive would have been measured in units of 1024 for capacity and 1000 for transfer speed. When the SI units were standardized in 1998, it helped drive manufacturers advertise larger numbers but it also rectified this accident of history where a standard prefix had been used with a non-standard definition in only one part of computing.