Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes - eviltoast
zeta.one
zeta.one
Blog about random technical stuff.

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It’s about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

  • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
    181·
    11 months ago

    there is nothing intrinsically base 2 about hard drives

    Yes there is. The addressing protocol. Sectors are 512 (2⁹) bytes, and there’s an integer number of them on a drive.

    • wischi@programming.devOPEnglish
      218·
      11 months ago

      That’s true but the entire disk size is not an exact power of two that’s why binary prefixes (1024 conversation) don’t have any benefit whatsoever when it comes to hard drives. With memory it’s a bit different because other than with storage devices RAM size is always exactly a power of two.