Blog Entry

Many of us just have been used to the fact that a 300 gigabyte hard drive only shows up as a 280 GB drive in our PC. The difference in size is the result of the weird situation that the IT industry looks at a kilobyte as 1024 bytes while the prefix kilo stands for 1000. Hard drive manifacturers just use 1000 for kilo.

This week I installed SLED on my workstation at the office and saw that the disk space available in System Monitor was indicated as GiB, as I never saw this before I was thinking “is this a bug�??

No, it's not a bug. One of my co-workers told me that the Gi prefix is the official prefix for 1024 x 1024 x 1024, just like there are Ki, Mi, Gi, Ti etc. For more details, have a look at Binary prefixes at Wikipedia.

Did you know about these standards? Have you seen these being used?