I've been ranting for ages about how hard drive manufacturers are ripping us off by saying a Gigabyte is 10^9 bytes - but a little nerdy Wikipedia trawl reveals that they are perfectly right! The official SI measure Gigabyte (GB) is indeed 10^9 bytes, and it is a GIBIbyte (GiB) that is 2^30 bytes - in fact the SI Committee won't allow the manufacturers to say that a Gigabyte is 2^30 bytes.
So NOW my rant is more informed. Now the question is, since computers rate hard drives by GiB and not GB, why don't the hard drive manufacturers sell us a 500GiB hard drive instead of a 500GB hard drive?
My god, it's sunny outside. What the hell am I doing?
I'd prefer oodlebytes.. which is just simply oodles o' bytes. Perfectly clear to anyone..
Harddrive manufacturers would look worse in the competion with other harddrive manufacturs if one sells a 500GB drive for 100€, and the other one sells a 500GB drive for 120€, however the latter one sells real GB, so it would be 524GB for the first one's GB measurement (500*1024*1024).
I think the SI standard is nonsense, they should rather enforce all harddrive manufacturers to indicate the drives in real GB. Or have laws in countries which forbid the import of wrongly indicated GB harddisks.
Actually the EU has already done similar restrictions for EU countries. They forbid for example using the word "butter" in any product which has no real butter in it. Unfortunately it didn't work very well in finland, since the finnish word for "force" contains the word "butter" (voi = butter, voima = force). So we had a margarine product called "voimariini" which means "forcerine", and now they had to rename it to "idealrine", since the EU thought it said "butter" although it said "force". I can't wait until they rename our powerplants to say also something else, because the word "powerplant" contains also the word "butter" (voimalaitos, which looks for the EU like "buttererplant").
I'd prefer oodlebytes.. which is just simply oodles o' bytes. Perfectly clear to anyone..
Won't make a difference what you call them -- everyone knows that a harddrive only has three possible states:
1) Brand New
2) Full
3) Broken
It is not as bad as back in the early 90s when some companies were selling hard drives based on "compressed" capacity.