27 August, 2011

Exbibyte divergence.

Mostly used by debian crackheads, but slowly becoming more widespread (and apparently also defined by the IEC) is the use of kibibyte to mean a kilobyte measured as 1024 bytes, so that KB can be used to mean kilobyte measured as 1000 bytes. There's a 2.4% difference between the two.

Correspondingly there is Mibibyte, Gibibyte, tebibyte, pebibyte, exbibyte, zebibyte, and yobibyte.

While the difference is only 2.4% at the kibibyte scale, it gets bigger with larger prefixes: by the time you get to petabytes, the scale of the largest file systems I have access to these days, the difference is over 12% and by yobibytes its 20%

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