Constant Flux

Yesterday I finally received my new 1.5 Terabyte drive. I felt like the dirty Harry of nerds. “This is the largest hard drive ever manufactured. It will blow your mind clean away. So you gotta ask yourself… do you feel lucky… punk?”

That was until I fired it up and discovered that it’s not actually 1.5 Terabytes.

Everybody knows that 1024 bytes is a Kilobyte, that 1024 Kilobytes is a Megabyte, 1024 Megabytes is a Gigabyte, and 1024 Gigabytes is a Terabyte. Everybody except drive manufacturers.

Instead of counting a Terabyte as 1,099,511,627,776 (1024^4) bytes, they redefined it to mean 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Effectively they are exploiting binary/decimal confusion to make drives seem larger than they actually are.

So my 1.5 Terabyte drive can actually only store 1.3635 Tebibytes. False advertising! I demand a 9.1% discount.

It’s still huge. I put every piece of data that I own on that drive, and I haven’t even filled a quarter yet.

“So, do ya… punk?”