On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 09:14 -0400, Jeremy Portzer wrote: > > The unambiguous way to resolve this is to use different prefixes when > referring to the 1024 multiples. For examples, 300 GB = 279.4 GiB. > 1 KiB = 1024 bytes, 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, 1GiB = 1024 MiB. > > The Ki,Mi,Gi, prefixes are not officially part of the metric or US units > system but are beginning to see wider acceptance. The original document > on this subject is here: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html > . If you do a Google search on "Kibi Mebi Gibi" or something like that > you'll see many more informative articles. > > I have to conclude that the drive manufacturers are "correct" when they > use the metric prefixes exactly as defined, K=10^3, M=10^6, G=10^9.
Except that the metric prefixes were defined only for use with metric units*, and B is neither a metric base nor derived unit. So KB, GB, etc were never metric units. If I'm not already too senile, I recall that in the olden days we used to say that a computer had 640K of memory, so K was actually a unit rather than a prefix. Why does this NIST proposal have me thinking about a little dog running around saying "Kibis and bits, kibis and bits." ** except in the odd case of the mass unit because its unit the Kilogram already includes a prefix so that for mass the prefix is applied to the unit gram.
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