Comments on: Lessons in Replacing Your Hard Disk #1 – How big is your disk really?

By: Torin

Torin — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:24:15 +0000

A giga of anything is 10^9, whether it be bits, bytes, grams, chairs, etc. So, their drives are in fact 320 gigabytes, but only about 298 gibibytes. 1 gibibyte = 1024^3 bytes = 2^30 bytes.

The definition of giga shouldn’t change just because you’re talking about computers.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:53:43 +0000

This is how ALL hard drives are sold.

Well, they shouldn’t be.

Surprisingly, this is not their fault at all, and is in fact your own fault for being stupid.

Yes, but I’ve been called up by novices before who claim that a hacker has destroyed their hard disk/they’ve been mis-sold the hard disk. Then you have to explain to them that 2^30b=1gB, not 10^9b, and that some space will be taken up by the OS, etc etc. Remember that computer novices often don’t read the small print.

It would be better, I think, if advertisements stated ‘about’ or ‘almost’ [insert disk size in billions of bytes here]. Or if they just counted in 2s when making the things.

I do believe that this should be properly explained to consumers BEFORE they buy a disk.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:40:50 +0000

This is how ALL hard drives are sold. They ALWAYS tell you the size in Billions of bytes, and call it a Gigabyte. It just so happens that it’s more convenient for an operating system to look at it as 2^30 bytes = 1GB instead. Surprisingly, this is not their fault at all, and is in fact your own fault for being stupid.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 13:26:19 +0000

As far as I can tell it’s Lucida Sans or Lucida Grande.

By: eanok

eanok — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:56:28 +0000

Could you tell me what the blog’s font is?