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It was utterly declassé, quite beyond the pale, completely /nekulturny/. Then, around about the late 1980s or early 1990s if I remember rightly, some twit associated with SI (Systeme International, not Sports Illustrated) noticed that the computer industry was measuring things in multiples of 1024 rather than multiples of 1000, and had an absolute conniption fit about it. It was logical, functional, and internally consistent. Memory capacities were dictated by address lines, which meant memory was sized in powers of 2, and it was only reasonable to expect a chuck of data that occupied 4k in memory to also occupy 4k on disk or tape – not 4.096kb. Contrary to some of the comments above, it made perfectly good sense. You know, up until the late 80s, everyone doing anything related to the computer industry followed the computer industry’s established power-of-2 standard, because computers worked in powers of 2 and powers of 10 were not useful.
#DRIVE GENIUS SNOW LEOPARD INSTALL#
There is a bright point, though: now you don’t have to ask where all that space went when you install or attach your new hard drive.įor more information, you can check out this Apple KnowledgeBase article. This may be a bit confusing for a while – after all, we’ve kind of gotten used to things the way they were.
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Divide 308,937,619 by both of those, and you can see how the Finder in each OS arrived at its figure. The only difference is the 10.5 uses base-2 for its measurement, and 10.6 uses base-10. In 10.6, though, they’re reported as being “larger.” But are they? The main folder shows up as having 308,937,619 bytes in both systems. These shots are of the same files, in the same folder, on the same drive. For example, here’s a pair of screen shots of a folder in my music library. All your files will seem “larger,” even though they all have the same number of bytes in them. The number of bytes that make up larger increments has just changed. Of course, this change in measurement is applied across the board in the finder. You still have the same number of bytes (the base unit) to deal with. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you magically get more drive space. In easier terms: a 500GB drive shows up as 500GB in the Finder, rather than 463.13GB.
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Instead of simply reporting the base-2 number for a unit of drive space, it converts it to an easier-to-understand base-10 number – the same way it is measured by drive manufacturers. Every gigabyte added to a drive exacerbated the problem, adding 73,741,824 bytes to the discrepancy. As drive capacities increased, however, this became more and more pronounced. This methodology worked fine for many years after all, 1024 isn’t TOO far off from 1000. To them, a kilobyte is defined as 1024 (which is 2 10) bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, and a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. However, computers don’t natively use base-10 they use a base-2 system. To drive manufacturers, a kilobyte was 1000 bytes, a megabyte was 1000 kilobytes and a gigabyte was 1000 megabytes. The real culprit here is the discrepancy between base-10 mathematics (how most of us count) and binary (aka “base-2″) counting. Many would chalk it up to “formatting.” While the formatting information takes up some space, 17GB is a little excessive for formatting data. For example, attaching a 250GB hard drive would show up in the system as having 232.74GB available. For a long time, there’s been an interesting discrepancy between the capacity listed on a hard drive’s label and the capacity reported by the computer.