this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
284 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
59092 readers
6622 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s not true either. Byte can be both powers of 10 and powers of 2. When talking about storage devices like hard drives etc. we usually refer to them in powers of 10, but OS’s usually do it in powers of 2. That’s why your hard drive looks smaller than advertised.
Bits are used for flash memory as individual chips. Assembled devices such as RAM and memory cards are advertised in bytes. I’m imagining that the same goes for hard drive platters and possibly disc media as well.
A byte in this context always means 8 bit though, it has nothing to do with powers of 10 or 2. The prefix of K (kilo), M (mega), G (giga) or Ki (kibi), Mi (mebi), Gi (gibi) doesn't change the meaning of "byte".
Yes this is right. There may be confusion happening with binary and metric prefixes.
For example:
Kibbibyte (1024 bytes) vs Kilobyte (1000 bytes).