External Drive Rant
Yesterday, I bought a new external drive for my laptop. This one’s a full desktop-sized driver in an external case rather than a laptop “portable” external drive like my existing external. Both coincidentally happen to be Maxtor Onetouch products, however in the external market not much matters other than the quality of the drive inside. Having a new 750GB external for my media is a great thing; it frees up the 120GB mini external for backups, and my laptop’s internal 120GB for programs.
There’s only one problem; 750GB it ‘aint.
As anyone in computer science knows, 1GB is 1024MB. This is due to everything being specified in powers of 2 rather than 10, as computers use a binary two-state storage mechanism. However, in the storage market, the more literal interpretation of the “Giga” prefix yields 1GB = 1000MB. While technically accurate due to the use of the SI prefix “Giga”, it goes against all of Computer Science and digital history, and is used for only one reason: money. By shaving a few megabytes off each gigabyte in the true capacity, the drive can be marketed as something it isn’t — for example, my new 750GB (from the box) appears to the OS as a 698GB disk, a loss of 52GB, or 7% of the stated capacity.
The situation is so bad, a new set of prefixes have been standardised to reduce confusion – enter the Gibibyte (GiB), Mibibyte (MiB) and Kibibyte (KiB). Each of these are the binary power-of-two honest-to-god real Computer Science definitions of the respective data sizes. Despite this, these prefixes are rarely used outside of the Linux and *nix realms, and thus OSes such as Windows still use the common Gigabyte, Megabyte and Kilobyte distinctions in the power-of-two sense, rather than the power-of-ten sense.
That means that the only people who insist on using the 1000MB = 1GB definition are the storage manufacturers, who have a definite advantage to doing so, since it allows them to sell products with less capacity than expected. In fact, the Seagate (owner of the Maxtor brand used on my new drive) has this to say about the subject:
Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 1024 or 210 (binary) was very nearly equal to 1000 or 103 (decimal) and started using the prefix “kilo” to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But almost overnight a much more numerous “everybody” bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometre is 1000 metres and a kilogram is 1000 grams.
What utter tripe. Everyone excluding storage manufacturers use the power-of-two system, thus I say the manufacturers are breaking user expectations by representing their capacities in the “incorrect” base system. If a user sees 750GB on the box, he or she expects the computer to recognise it as 750GB, regardless of the base system. Storage manufacturers should give their capacities in the same manner as the OS, to reduce confusion. The fact that the above article is even in the Seagate knowedge-base to begin with is ample proof of this. Users don’t care how many MB are in a GB, just so long as what’s on the box is what’s shown in the OS.
I wonder what Seagate’s response will be if I ask for 7% of my money back, to cover the discrepancy.
