shadron
9th April 2008, 11:08 PM
I have often thought it was neat that, since we don't have 16 fingers and thereby come across hexadecimal numbers honestly, at least there is a nice, close relationship between the 2 and 10 radix systems:
10^3 ~= 2^10 (kilobytes) 2.4% difference
10^6 ~= 2^20 (megabytes) 4.8% difference
10^9 ~= 2^30 (gigabytes) 7.4% difference
10^12 ~= 2^40 (terabytes) 10% difference
10^15 ~= 2^50 (petabytes, which the Hadron collider will be continuously generating per month of operation soon)
12.6% difference
and so on. Now, I'm most certainly not the first one to see this, though I've not actually seen the relationship spelled out anywhere; in particular, disk drive salesmen have used it for years to sell meg/gigabytes of disk drive in the 10's based system while the binary system is the one that most others use (such as DOS and Windows), thus artificially inflating their wares. When I went out and researched the Hadron Collider stats above, I found to my amazement that another, parallel system of prefixes has been developed to specifically address the binary versions of these entities:
2^10 kibibyte
2^20 mebibyte
2^30 gibibyte
2^40 tebibyte
2^50 pebibyte
2^60 exbibyte
2^70 zebibyte
2^80 yobibyte
No more confusion! Mebe.
BTW, the reference I was looking at is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte. there's lots of examples there about datastorage in the Petabyte class.
1000% of your daily ration of trivia.
10^3 ~= 2^10 (kilobytes) 2.4% difference
10^6 ~= 2^20 (megabytes) 4.8% difference
10^9 ~= 2^30 (gigabytes) 7.4% difference
10^12 ~= 2^40 (terabytes) 10% difference
10^15 ~= 2^50 (petabytes, which the Hadron collider will be continuously generating per month of operation soon)
12.6% difference
and so on. Now, I'm most certainly not the first one to see this, though I've not actually seen the relationship spelled out anywhere; in particular, disk drive salesmen have used it for years to sell meg/gigabytes of disk drive in the 10's based system while the binary system is the one that most others use (such as DOS and Windows), thus artificially inflating their wares. When I went out and researched the Hadron Collider stats above, I found to my amazement that another, parallel system of prefixes has been developed to specifically address the binary versions of these entities:
2^10 kibibyte
2^20 mebibyte
2^30 gibibyte
2^40 tebibyte
2^50 pebibyte
2^60 exbibyte
2^70 zebibyte
2^80 yobibyte
No more confusion! Mebe.
BTW, the reference I was looking at is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte. there's lots of examples there about datastorage in the Petabyte class.
1000% of your daily ration of trivia.