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April 23, 2004

Technology at 11:51:08 PM MT (link) | Know what a KiB is? A MiB, GiB, and TiB? Just in case anyone needs general education, these are the new SI prefixes for numbers that are based off the power of 2, rather than 10.

Classicly, KB has been used to refer to 1024, 210, instead of what it should be, 1000, 103. People in the technology industry use either depending on what benefits them best. For example, hard drive manufacturers report their drive sizes as true GB, meaning they are based off of powers of 10. When you look at your disk in your operating system, you see less space than you should have gotten, because the operating system is counting bytes by power of 2. When you buy a 10GB disk, you're getting 10x109-many bytes. Your operating system reports this as how many bytes it is in powers of 2, which would be 10000000000 divided by 230, or 9.31 GiB.

What to do what to do? Invent new SI prefixes! See the NIST's page on binary prefixes for more information. KB, for example, will remain a power of 10 (as it has been for who knows how long), 103, and KiB will be the corresponding power of 2 prefix, meaning 210.

So, yeah, if everyone could be consistent from now on, the world would be a much happier place.