New Pet Peeve

Ok, before I launch into this, you have to understand I'm a computer geek. I was raised on them almost from birth. That might explain my bias on the following issue...

Anyway, I was reading about DVD book types (-R, +R, etc) and came across a 'problem' that seems to have passed me by. It appears that many people don't understand that 1GB = 1024MB, not 1000MB. A lot of non-geeks (i.e. normal people) are getting in a fluster as they feel the terms kilo, mega, giga, etc should refer to round numbers, as they do in scientific and engineering fields.

The confusion has arisen over the way DVD and hard drive manufacturers have labelled the storage capacity of their products. DVDs are advertised as holding 4.7GB but users quickly discover that they can only fit 4.38GB of data onto them. This is because the 4,700,000,000 bytes of space on each DVD is calculated in base 10 (move the decimal point) giving 4.7.

However, since this is binary data we are talking about, any calculation has to be done in binary, or base 2. This calculation is 4,700,000,000 ÷ 1024 = 4589843.75 ÷ 1024 = 4482.27 ÷ 1024 = 4.38. This is the value that Windows and all decent PC software will give you. People think they are losing data capacity somewhere and are being ripped off.

The problem I have with the whole thing is that the manufacturers are claiming higher capacity products than they are actually supplying and misleading customers. Hard drive manufacturers have done this for several years now. I'm quite used to buying 200GB drives and only seeing 186GB of free space.

The solution put forward by some in the industry is to create a new acronym for computer-based binary storage. Instead of GB, MB and KB, we now have GiB, MiB and KiB. Gibibytes, Mebibytes and Kibibytes. I'm sorry, but I find that hard to swallow, let alone pronounce. "I'd like a 500 Gibibyte drive please." Ridiculous. If the manufacturers hadn't taken advantage of purchaser ignorance in the first place and realigned the definitions, we wouldn't have this problem. I'd like to say we should put everything back the way it was, but it's looking increasingly likely that GiBs, MiBs and KiBs will become the standard in the next few years.