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added hard-drive capacity Snow leopard
- Thread starter dergaderg
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Snow Leopard's Disk Utility uses "Drivemaker's Gigabytes" (1 billion bytes instead of 1,024 megabytes), evidently. Not sure I like that for some reason....
No - a HDD has x many number of bytes.
The bytes are expressed in GBs and that can be worked out in either 1000 to the power of 3 (decimal) or 1024 to the power of three (binary).
That will give a different final capacity (although the amount of data the drive can hold is the same).
So I'm guessing SL has changed to decimal.
The bytes are expressed in GBs and that can be worked out in either 1000 to the power of 3 (decimal) or 1024 to the power of three (binary).
That will give a different final capacity (although the amount of data the drive can hold is the same).
So I'm guessing SL has changed to decimal.
"Giga" does actually mean one billion. One Gigawatt = one billion Watt, one Gigabit per second = one billion bits per second, and it has always been that way. The use of KB = 1,024 byte, MB = 1,024 KB, GB = 1,024 MB was always an anomaly. There are official units KiB = 1,024 byte, MiB, and GiB.
One effect of this change will be less complaints from people who buy a 500 GB drive and feel ripped off when Disk Utility shows "465 GB" only. I can also remember some definite confusion when I tried to create a 20 billion byte partition and different bits of software couldn't agree how much one "GB" should be.
I don't know if this is a different issue, but I've noticed slightly larger file sizes in Snow Leopard. Like a DVD I backup with DVD2OneX before Snow Leopard was 4.34; under SL it is 4.66 (but still burned correctly). Files that were 3999 MB on my PS3 are showing as 4.19 on my Mac.
That's going to throw off all my FAT32 tinkering. I knew I did bad in math for a reason.