• Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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    7 months ago

    The result of marketing pushing base 10 numbers on an archiecture that is base 2. Fundamentally is caused by the difference of 10³ (1000) vs 2¹⁰ (1024).

    Actual storage size of what you will buy is Amount = initial size * (1000/1024)^n where n is the power of 10^n for the magnitude (e.g kilo = 3, mega = 6, giga = 9, tera = 12)

    • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Fact: This truth is intentionally manipulation.

      OP is right with an applicable staturing the pic.

      Solution: Sue the fuck out of all of them. Especially Samsung. Fuck Samsung everything.

      • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        its correct, the final size you see in the OS is not kilo/giga/terabytes but kibi/gibi/tebibytes. the problem is less of the drive and more of how the OS displays the value. the OS CHOOSES to display it in base 2, but drives are sold in base 10, and what is given is actually correct. Windows, being the most used one, is the most guilty of starting the trend of naming what should be kibi/gibi/tebibytes as kilo/giga/terabytes. Essentially, 2 Tera Bytes ~= 1.82 Tebibytes. many OS’ display the latter but use the former naming

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Base 2 based displays and calling them kilobytes date back to the 1960s. Way before the byte was standardised to be eight bits (and according to network engineers it still isn’t you still see new RFCs using “octet”).

          Granted though harddisks seem to have been base-10 based from the very beginning, with the IBM 350 storing five million 6-bit bytes. Window’s history isn’t in that kind of hardware though but CP/M and DOS, and dir displayed in base 2 from the beginning (page 10):

          Displays the filename and size in kilobytes (1024 bytes).

          Then, speaking of operating systems with actual harddrive support: In Unix ls -lh seems to be universally base-2 based (GNU has --si to switch which I think noone ever uses). -h (and -k) are non-standard, you won’t find them in POSIX (default is to print raw number of bytes, no units).

    • triclops6@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      This is intentional, they could offer proper TiB storage but Apple started doing this decades ago just to shave pennies and now it’s caught on

  • tromars@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    I know this a a joke but in case some people are actually curious: The manufacturer gives the capacity in Terabytes (= 1 Trillion Bytes) and the operating system probably shows it in Tebibytes (1024^4 Bytes ≈ 1.1 Trillion Bytes). So 2 Terabytes are two trillion bytes which is approximately 1.82 Tebibytes

  • only0218@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Instead of that we should protest against si k should be K

    • B
    • kB < — Imposter
    • MB
    • GB
    • TB
    • PB

    (Since this is SI it’s powers of 10^3 not 2^10 when going one level up)

    • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      and μ should be u maybe… why throw in a random non-latin character? is it for the sake of anti-anglocentrism?

      • Zangoose@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Can’t tell if this is sarcasm (I’ve been on the internet too much today sorry) but just in case the Greek μ (mu) stands for “micro” since ‘m’ is already used for “milli”

        • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          yeah, i get that, but many people just use u because its more accessible (ascii and qwerty compatible), similar to writing μBittorrent as uBittorrent. imo i dont think its too big of a deal if it doesnt match the word micro, since μ is already a bit of a stretch. this is just my opinion, im not advocating for a SI reform or anything :)

          • Turun@feddit.de
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            7 months ago

            μ is not a stretch at all, it’s literally the first character of the word micro. (Mu, iota, kappa, rho, omega). Similar to how other scientific words are derived from their original language.

            It doesn’t matter, most people will understand you if you write um instead of μm, because it isn’t ambiguous.

  • neonred@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s 2 TB, not 2 TiB. One is to the base of 10, the other to the base of 2.

    • cryostars@lemmyf.uk
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      7 months ago

      I’ve always known the advertised space is larger than the actual space, but it was never quite the shock as it was when I recently bought an 18TB external drive with ~16 TB usable.

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        7 months ago

        It was so during the age of floppy discs. Our computers use TiB, marketers use TB to sell storage

        • Phrodo_00@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          The biggest problem is that Windows still calls TiB and friends with si prefixes (so 1TiB shows as 1TB). MS has done this since DOS (but at least back then MiB didn’t exist. They could’ve used base 10 though).

          • psud@aussie.zone
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            7 months ago

            TiB (and the related) didn’t get named until recently, and I think only Linux uses those abbreviations — and not universally — windows still says kB, mB etc, while using the binary equivalents

    • neonred@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      A 14 TB medium is always 14 TB, which is close to 12 TiB. Minus metadata of the filesystem and granularity of a allocation sector.

  • Turun@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    The issue is in your software that displays the capacity (most likely windows).

    You bought 2 TB SSD. You got 2 TB SSD. This is equivalent to 1.8 TiB (think of it like yards and meter). Windows shows you the capacity in TiB, but writes TB next to it.

    Say you buy a 2.18 yard stick. You get a 2.2 yard stick, which is equivalent to 2 meter. Windows will tell you it’s 2 yards long. Why? I don’t know.

  • letsgo@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    They’ve been doing this for literally centuries.

    I think it started out with a rare case of honest advertising. So for example 720K floppies were advertised as 720K. But then some lying bastard clever marketer decided to start advertising their 720K floppies as 1MB floppies, sometimes but not always marked “unformatted capacity”.

    And of course this had the desired effect of making people buy their disks instead of the honestly marketed ones, because people didn’t read the small print and thought they were getting more storage, which was important before CDs were a thing and software distributions were starting to need multiple disks. So everyone had to start doing it.

    This is as far back as my memory of the practice goes, so it may have started before 720K floppies were mainstream, but that’s why disk manufacturers now advertise the unformatted capacity of their drives instead of the formatted, aka usable, capacity.

    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      they’ve been doing this for literally centuries

      So it’s Friday December the fifth, 80 AD, 5:30pm, and Mozes is hacking away on his clay tables to nail down the final tally of this week’s adminstration of the amount of cows his boss owns and he goes "Mother fucker! These romans again ripped me off, sold me a clay tablet that only allows me to count to 720 cows, not the 751 I got! FUCK! Now I need another tablet and start tallying from the beginning, you mother fuckers!

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      They’ve been doing this for literally centuries.

      *Proceeds to talk about floppy disks

      How long do you think digital computers have been around?

      • letsgo@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        For centuries. Justification: Jesus was dead for three days: from Friday afternoon (3pm?), day 1, through Saturday, day 2, and into Sunday early morning (6am?), day 3. Total elapsed time 39 hours. Digital computers were around last century (19xx) and this century (20xx), which is two centuries by the same logic. Also two millenia, but I find “centuries” a more satisfying word. Colossus went into operation in 1943, so that’s 80 years elapsed time.

  • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    This is where garderobe manufacturers are technically right, but theyre still dicks by (ab)using the fuck out of it.

    TB = factors of 1000 which humans use, TiB is factors of 1024, which computers use.

    Yes yes, they have it correct, it’s 2TB but you’re selling less than expected and you fucking know it.

    Then there is also the filesystem that takes a small required cut to store your files nicely but that is almost negligible

  • Sunkblake@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Like many have already said, there is a difference in units when talking about actual storage and the storage on the label.

    I feel like some marketing team made the changes, because it is technically correct and “easier for normal people to understand”… But that makes it confusing when normal people plug it in so, that team should be thrown overboard.

    Edit: easier not earlier

    • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      Also you’re losing space to file system stuff. So it will always look smaller than it is

  • HeckGazer@programming.dev
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    7 months ago

    I’d be thrilled if the SSD I bought ended up being almost 8x larger than advertised! Does beg the question of why you’re buying 250GB SSDs in 2023 but I’m not here to judge.