This meme really is just ‘my perspective’ at either end and ‘yours’ in the middle.
It’s “my perspective is right but some people believe it for the wrong reasons”.
Or “there’s a common belief that seems naive as you start looking closer at it, but eventually it turns out to be more accurate than the assumptions someone with a little experience might make”.
You will never hear me say gibibytes in public though. Telling on my nerdy ass self is for private conversations.
Not with that attitude.
This meme template doesn’t make any sense with regard to the topic. Like, not even a bit.
The OS uses 1024 and the drive manufacturers are using 1000.
Which is why a 1TB drive shows 931GiB of capacity. (1024 GiB =1 TiB, 1024MiB =1 GiB, 1024KiB =1MiB, 1024 Bytes =1KiB) but the drive manufacturers using SI prefixes doing 1000 Bytes =1 KB, 1000 KB = 1MB, 1000MB = 1GB, 1000GB = 1TB.
Thus the discrepancy.
Yeah:
1000 GB × 1000 × 1000 × 1000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 931.32 GiB
It’s a sufficient explanation. I don’t know why the meme has the highest IQ person say “I don’t know”, unless the joke is that it’s easier than explaining…
I don’t know why the meme has the highest IQ person say
Every time I see the midwit meme format, it reads like OP imagines that they’re the 145 IQ guy who is above it all, when all other evidence suggests that they’re closer to the 55 IQ guy.
I’m guessing that IDK is for why they write it as GB and not GiB
I don’t know why the meme has the highest IQ person say “I don’t know”
that is what happens when 100 iq meme author tries to think like 145 iq person, which is of course impossible by definition…
But the smallprint explanation in the middle of the meme is actually spot on. Whoever made this does know the correct explanation and seemingly also knows that it comes out to 931 GB from the unit conversion alone.
I’m really not sure this meme makes sense. 😅
Because there are other things that change usable space, like file tables, OS stuff, and bad sectors. The unit conversion is the biggest one, but not the only one.
Look at Mr. “100 IQ” over here
128 IQ*
Which itself is for marketing reasons, a manufacturer would find it difficult to compete with others using units that make their drives look larger or cheaper at “same capacity”.
There is also the smaller amount w!ndows will secretly waste for its own pleasure (few GiB iirc). And an even smaller amount that gets wasted in partitioning. Usually around 5MiB, you can reduce it to 16kiB with some manual configuration in gdisk, or you can skip partition tables entirely for some end-game cursedness. And then the filesystem will take some. ext4 takes based on the number of inodes, for large drives that can be tens of GiB. Btrfs takes almost nothing (though in the background allocates in steps of 1GiB, so some tools might show 2GiB used as soon as data is written). Then if you try to sum all files on disk, that will land even lower for many more reasons.
I’d just like to point out that while I understand the reason, I’m just not willing to explain that to people anymore in all them words so now I just say IDK
And it gets more complicated when we get to the metadata and filesystem structure. So, you technically never get to store 931GB, I wonder what the (average) ratio of metadata to data is? 3:1?
Depends on the file system. If you are using FAT-8; it is 256:1 if you are on ZFS it is as low as 1:4.
It also depends on composition of the data stored. If it is Linux ISOs; it is 4GB:64KB. If it is old C source code; it is 512B:4KB on ext4
Bootlickers will then argue it’s cool that the manufacturer screws you out of almost a hundred gigs.
since it’s 69GB it’s not cool, it’s nice
They should just be requires to use consistent units of measurement.
It is just greediness.
SSDs also have over-provisioning (which is not a bad thing imo)
The old GiB vs GB
Plus some programs showing space actually usable for your data (not unreasonable from user perspective), which means another chunk is gone as overhead from the file system.
To make things more confusing, there’s a goofy formula which tells you the actual capacity of a given advertised capacity. A drive advertised as 1 TB will always have exactly 1,000,204,886,016 bytes. It helps to have consistency, but nobody seems to knows where the formula came from.
Slack space for sector remapping maybe? Similar to SSDs being over provisioned.
And with partitions being offset 1MiB from the start of the drive (For alignment), the extra space would help preserve capacity anyway.
That genuinely sounds fascinating, but I can’t click “necessary cookies only” on my phone.
Interesting.
Has anyone ever used the last byte on any hard disc in a successful manner?
I mean not by just putting a too large file there, but something that actually utilized that final byte and having the machine still run flawlessly?
Be the change you want to see, and report back 😅
I already did it on floppies.
I also attempted to program the entire AD&D rules as an Amiga Basic program. It ran well for a start, but then I noticed that the random generator always returned the same dice rolls. Turned out that the RAM was used up, so it couldn’t store the random value anywhere. The program was fine otherwise. Just out of ram.
Anyway, I miss the ingenuity of having too little space, more than I am impressed with the possibilities of having too much.
People simply did more with less. I want that to return. The bloat is obscene, and hopefully AI is going to break the balloon of it. Nobody really needs several gigabytes of code to run a 2 line program.
I don’t think it would be possible if the machine is running on it, since it would be constantly trying to write logs, and errors would arise when that write operation failed.
Machines also run slower if you’ve used almost all of your disc space, as OSes does RAM data swaps, for data it can’t/won’t hold in memory. Go down to 10 GB of space and your machine is bloody slow
That’s your OS using base 2 units and calling it TB. The drive ships with 1TB.
I really love how this really applied to basically everything, the more you know about Linux for example – the most you are happy that something worked instead of asking HOW it works
I’m talking to you, RAM memory!
FML you’re telling me I need Random Access Memory Memory now? 😩 Never getting a new pc.
is there something wrong with RAM on windows? iirc this was one of the things that worked normally for me.
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