Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Freeing up disk space problem!!
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:28:35
Message-Id: 20120301102654.682e5041@khamul.example.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Freeing up disk space problem!! by Frank Steinmetzger
1 On Thu, 1 Mar 2012 02:09:04 +0100
2 Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@×××.de> wrote:
3
4 > > Disk manufacturers measure kilos of data as 1000
5 > > Everyone else measures it in 1024
6 >
7 > Well, to nitpick, they say it correctly, as for their "kilo", 10^3
8 > bytes is correct. We, the binary folk, assert kilo to be 2^10 bytes
9 > which is actually called kibi, but we still use "kilo" in our
10 > everyday language thanks to historical ballast (and because, as I
11 > recently heard, the -bi units aren't around that long yet). First
12 > time I heard of them was in uni lecture ~2003±1.
13
14 Yeah, I know the reasoning they use. But the entire world and everyone
15 in it intuitively expects disk capacity to be measured in units of 2^X
16
17 Especially as the disk manufacturers themselves make their disks to
18 have allocation unit like 512, 1024 and 4096 bytes, not 500, 1000 and
19 4000
20
21 --
22 Alan McKinnnon
23 alan.mckinnon@×××××.com