What does TB stand for?

[DeZmond]

Hard drive manufacturers are stingy and use everything in blocks of 1000, not 1024. So they think a KB is 1000 bytes, a MB is 1000 KB, a GB is 1000MB, and a TB is 1000GB. It's quite annoying, because you very quickly lose a huge amount of capacity the higher the capacity of the hard drive. It's a misleading practice which should be stopped. But enough of my ranting...

 

[Pestcontrol]

It's not misleading when it's applied consequently, which it is. I think using powers of 1024 is the misleading practise here. It's not SI or decimal but an ugly crossbreed between binary and decimal, a relic from the past never dealt with.

The only place where i see powers 1024 make sense is for RAM.

 

[Fuzzy Bunny]

It's not really powers of 1024 I think, more like powers of 2 to the 10th and onward.

1024 to the 2nd would be something near the millions I believe.

 

[Pestcontrol]

It'd be just over a million, otherwise known as "MB".
Do the math, it's right.

As the SI system officially works with 10^3, 10^6, it's the same as 1000 and 1000^2, etc. The same goes for 1024. A kilobyte is 2^10 bytes, a megabyte 2^20, gigabyte 2^30, etc.

 

[DocBot]

There is an official distinction between TiB and TB (and KiB, KB, etc) but it's pretty new and i don't remember which is which, and i rarely see it used.

all those iB's are kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, pebi-,exbi-, zebi-, and yobi-(bytes), respectively. They're binary prefixes (2[sup]10[/sup], 2[sup]20[/sup], etc...), as opposed to the decimal prefixes tera-, exa-, zetta-, and yotta-.

 

[Gopha]

wow does it rweally matter losing somethng like 24 mb?

 

[DocBot]

Well with your system of weights and measurements (Stones? Feet?) I guess it wouldn't. For you ;P

 

[Pestcontrol]

As i said earlier (do people ever read my posts? ), for the terabyte you actually get 10% less space than you'd expect to have. That's a full one hundred GB. The bigger disks get, the more it starts to matter. Assuming you'd actually fill the disk to capacity.