[TriLUG] RHAS---300gig?

[Rick DeNatale]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 09:14 -0400, Jeremy Portzer wrote:

> 
> The unambiguous way to resolve this is to use different prefixes when
> referring to the 1024 multiples.  For examples, 300 GB = 279.4 GiB.
> 1 KiB = 1024 bytes, 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, 1GiB = 1024 MiB.
> 
> The Ki,Mi,Gi, prefixes are not officially part of the metric or US units
> system but are beginning to see wider acceptance.  The original document
> on this subject is here:  http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
> .  If you do a Google search on "Kibi Mebi Gibi" or something like that
> you'll see many more informative articles.
> 
> I have to conclude that the drive manufacturers are "correct" when they
> use the metric prefixes exactly as defined, K=10^3, M=10^6, G=10^9. 

Except that the metric prefixes were defined only for use with metric
units*, and B is neither a metric base nor derived unit. So KB, GB, etc
were never metric units.  If I'm not already too senile, I recall that
in the olden days we used to say that a computer had 640K of memory, so
K was actually a unit rather than a prefix.

Why does this NIST proposal have me thinking about a little dog running
around saying "Kibis and bits, kibis and bits."

** except in the odd case of the mass unit because its unit the Kilogram
already includes a prefix so that for mass the prefix is applied to the
unit gram.
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