[KDE] kiB, MiB? What happens up-scale?

[Fester Bestertester]

...and how to change it? Migabytes? Not really ... GiB (Gigabytes) I can understand, but what about Terabytes, Petabytes and Exabytes? Are they TiB, PiB and EiB? To my sensibilities, the i stands for idiot.

I'd dearly like to change to the SI units (Standards International IIRC): k, M, G, T, P, E ... no second letter to the 'multiplier'. How does one accomplish this (Kubi 16.06 amd64)?

[Qqmike]

Base 10 and base2, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
Or am I missing the point you are making?

[oshunluvr]

IMO it's no more confusing than being an American in a world of Metric System. Ya just have to learn both.

As Mike points out (I think ) computers count in binary but we count in 10s. So both numbers have a purpose. One is precise and the other good for sale of hard drives...

[Fester Bestertester]

I stand educated! Thanks, both. I'd not encountered those terms in daily use. That second letter gets a little awkward at non-vowel Exa, but it all works.

[jlittle]

The SI people cried foul at kilo meaning 1024 "sometimes", but it was the practice of some hard drive sellers that pushed the adoption of the 2^10 prefixes; if you get a 2 terabyte drive, you get about 1000000000000 bytes, not 1099511627776. Only for RAM and cache are the old meanings used.

Regards, John Little

[Qqmike]

I've seen flash drives that go either way. Must read the fine print. Not that it matters so much.

[Fester Bestertester]

All academic anyway ... once partitioned and formatted with filesystem there's considerably less available for usable data than either.