When and when not, things are measured in binary

Hard disk drives

HDD sizes are measured by HDD manufactures in decimal. So when they say a HDD is 750 GB in size, they do really mean that it is 750 000 000 000 Bytes. Giga means billion, that’s why.

HDD sizes are measured by Windows and Mac (as of writing) in binary. So a 750 GB is shown up as 698.49 in Windows 7 or Mac OS X Leopard. 698.49 is actually 698.49 GiB, but they mistakenly show it as 698.49 GB. This is where the most confusion confusion is coming from. Most Linux distributions, however, show it correctly as 698.49 GiB.

RAM

Random Access Memory is measured in binary. So they are actually 2 GiB, 4 GiB etc. Manufactures label them incorrectly as GB. Windows and Mac OS X also label them incorrectly as GB.

Files

File sizes in computers are measured in binary. Windows and Mac OS X measure them in binary but show the decimal unit. Linux does it correctly by measuring in binary and displaying them in binary units also.

CDs

These are measured in binary by the manufacturer. A 80 minute CD has 700 MiB or 734003200 Bytes. Since they are measured in binary by the manufacturer, the same value will be shown up correctly in Windows and Mac OS X (but with the wrong label). If you create a CD image file, the file of the CD image would be 700 MiB.

DVD5, DVD9 etc.

Measured in decimal by the manufacturers just like the HDDs. A 4.7 GB DVD-R has 4 700 000 000 Bytes. Since the size is measured in decimal, in Windows and Mac OS X, they should show up as 4483 MiB or 4.37 GiB. But remember, since Windows and Mac OS X uses wrong labels, they will show up as 4483 MB or 4.37 GB. If you create a DVD image file, the file size of the DVD would be 4.37 GiB.

Bit rate

Bit rate of an MP3 is measured in decimal. 192 kb/s would be 192 000 bits per second = 24 000 bytes per second = 24 kilobytes per second = 23.4375 kibibytes per second. So every second you are listening to a 192 kb/s stream online, you are using up 23.4375 KiB of your online usage quota per second. If you listened continuously for 1 hour that is 84375 KiB = 82.397 MiB.

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