On Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 02:59:47PM -0700, Charles Curley wrote:
Mr. Tarsnap forgets something. The reason disks are addressed in powers of two has to do with mathematics. Every hard and floppy disk out there has flaws. To get around that, data is divided into sectors, and checksums calculated. Done right, this allows for error correction for small flaws. The math works out better if you do it in chunks that are integer powers of two. So floppy disks have sectors of 256 octets, and their attendant checksums. Modern hard drives schlep data in chunks of 4096 (2^12) octets. And bytes these days are eight bits.
The thing is, nobody cares about all that. It's an implementation detail that matters not to any normal person. Normal people care about things like "when I just look at the first couple of numbers of the size in bytes, is it the same thing as the size in <insert large unit> or do I need to do a bunch of math to answer a simple question?"
GB or GiB? I don't care, just be clear which one you are using.
Which nobody is. The right answer is to stop using power of two units because they are pointless.
