[timbre1234]

Sadly OP is behind the times here. The storage industry has pretty much co-opted GB to mean 1000^3 bytes, which is why you see folks in the know refering to GiB for the power-of-two-numbers. This is super-frustrating, but it's been like that for decades (literally: this was finally "officially" resolved in the late 90's by the IEC).

It's frustrating that SanDisk used to give you extra bytes and they stopped -- and everyone including me HATES it when products get worse with no external indication that they changed.......but let's be honest: it's kind of SanDisk's primary MO to buy the cheapest NAND they can find and sell it on the consumer market.

[dspillett]

> The storage industry has pretty much co-opted GB to mean 1000^3 bytes

G has always been 1000^3, M 1000^2, and K 1000, in the storage and communication industries. OS designers, and programmers more generally, started using 1024 instead for convenience, but that came later. The storage industry is doing it right, using the correct meaning of SI units, and programmers co-opted GB to mean 1024^3, it isn't the other way around.

There were times when the storage industry and programmers worked together to really stuff things up and cause further confusion by mixing & matching: the 1.44MB of HD 3.5" floppy disks was actually 1474560 bytes so 1.44*1024*1000.

[pbhjpbhj]

You say M "has always been" 1000000 in your first para, then tell us in the second how it didn't used to be that way.

[Dylan16807]

Please look at the numbers in the article again.

The old drive had 16 billion usable bytes. The new drive has 15.4 billion.

Base 2 has nothing to do with this problem.

[Y-bar]

You are entirely correct, and the person you are responding to is wrong. But the author does themselves no favour by including this incorrect tidbit in the article:

> [...] Operating Systems define 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 BYTES.

Mac OS, iOS, Ubuntu, and Debian operating systems at the very least all use base 10 for representing disk and storage space.

[timbre1234]

Yup, looks like I mis-skimmed the article. Thrown off by the (somewhat out of place, in retrospect) quote about it. My bad.