I was reinstalling my sisters PC the other day and I elected to backup her data onto a USB storage pen. We opted for an 8Gb stick in PC world, and I think we paid about £12. I noticed, when the device was plugged in, that the available data size was not the full 8Gb. Obviously, this is because in the data storage industry a Kilobyte is measured as 1000bytes, not 1024, as has been the practice ever since I bought my first HDD (which was a whopping 40Mb drive!)

But, when you think about it isn’t this a little short sighted considering the issue this generates as we begin to use larger and larger data sizes. For example, when this was applied to Kb and Mb the difference was far less in evidence, as we begin to use Terabytes, Petabytes and eventually Exabytes this disparity between the advertised size and the usable size also manifests itself exponentially. The end result is that my shiny new 8Gb USB memory stick has a usable capacity of only 7.59Gb    :-\

Extending this example to an 8Exabyte storage device (which had a perfect 8,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of space) the usable area would only in fact be 6.94Xb ! I think people will start to think hang on I paid for 8 and i’m now only getting only 6.9 ???

(If you want the full excel sheet including the hidden Giga, Mega and Kilo columns please just drop me a mail)

I wonder when the Industry will adopt the true 1024 factored scaling as standard?…

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