In computers 1KB always means 1024 bytes except if you are selling a hard drive, in which case its 1,000 bytes. A lawsuit was filed in 2003 against manufacturers for doing this. http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2003/09/20030918190839.shtml which is kind of funny since 80GB really is 80x10^9 bytes, not 80x1024x1024x1024. The definition of kilo is 1000, not 1024. If you have an 80GB drive with a cluster size of 32768 Bytes and you have a ton of files of length 32768, you'll be able to fill up all 80GB (minus things like the mbr and fat table) and show that windows is a liar for saying that you only had 74.5GB. What windows meant was that you had 74.5x1024x1024x1024, which is 80,000,000,000, aka 80GB. But this whole discussion is pretty moot since you never want your hard drive to get anywhere near full anyway in order for it to maintain max performance, and you'll also never match cluster size and file size like in the above paragraph so you'll always have a lot of wasted bytes inside of half-full clusters. a parity bit will make a byte longer than 8 bits, usually 9 bits, but this does not figure into this discussion since we usually deal in bytes not bits. 128MB of 8bit bytes is the same number of bytes as 128MB of 9bit bytes: 134.2 million bytes (128x1024x1024)

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bery berry easy one is digital and one is analog. let me explain. analog, one K is 1000 digital one K is 1024 like measuring distance in meters or in yards. But in this case they are both called the same, just not the same units. ie one meg in digital is not one meg in analog. so one meg, analog is 1000 times 1K ie 1000 but in digital.....is 1024 times 1K ie 1024 so 1 gig is analog 1000 times 1000 times 1000 digital is 1024 times 1024 times 1024 when u talk about one k, its not much of a difference but with u talk about many gigs..all those little ones add up. like ones change....keep putting it in a piggy bank and later not sooner, u will have some bux. Second. some hard drive manufactures report the total size before formatting others report size after formatting. something like buying lumber. is a 2x4 really 2 inches by 4 inches? same idea here. Just do not get one pound of feathers confused with one pound of metal.hehehehehe

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myardor you are on the right track but are too concerned with appearing as a scientist when in fact you are not yet

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Myardor, lol. Keep going to therapy, lol. Johnoh. Great explanation. The nitty gritty of hard drive info is interesting.

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johnob what do u mean....too concerned with appearing as a scientist? i can not spell injineer but i is one. i can spell spell but not spell otherz i might not be a scienistz but later i might is one.

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Perplexer, have u ever bought hambugers? at mickeys ds or anyother place, even Fudruckers? good, ok do u think the quater pound burgers are really quater pound burgers/ meat when u get them? NOOOOOOOOOOoo way jose, its the before cooking weight. same for all burgers, steaks, etc. That is the reason that suit against the hard drive manufactures will lose. The simple answer to your q is this when selling to u, most ppl will use the number that makes their product look larger, ie 1 k = 1000 when one is buying one wants to use the number that will show the smallest overall size. best deal example..you are looking at two different hard drives to buy. different manufactures. one says 80 gigs other says 76 gigs at the same price, most ppl would buy the larger one. so manufactures knowing this use the number that "shows" a larger drive. most ppl do not look at the really important features all they go for is size. some ppl are finally wising up. no johnog i am not wising up...not yet, i still is an injuneer. in parity, the 9th bit was for error correction. it was used in the beginning of the PC life, the Macs never had to use it cause they were " more correct" in the PC, the 9 th bit has almost be not used anymore cause the PC finally is " more correct" ie less prone to data loss, errors, etc. it was esp usefull in data xfer, ie modem, internet, pc to pc data xfer, etc. either way, 8 or 9 bits, it all took space to save, after all a byte is a binary unit, a 0 or a 1 so a 8 bit byte will take less space than a 9 bit byte. multiply that my hundreds and hundreds of bytes and now they take more space. the average person does not have to worry abut byte size.

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johnjohn and Xrated Frank, i thought this board/forum was to "tech support for business and you" i did not know it was for personal attacks, ribbing, etc. ie.." Keep going to therapy, lol." " too concerned with appearing as a scientist when in fact you are not yet" its posters like u guys that mess u the system. to me, it goes in one eye and out the other. but i will post since i am on the net from 8 to 3 and sometimes the market is slow. hey to not get negative or become a hater. i know that most punny ppl become negative so fast or become haters at a second notice once i push their buttons. Did u moma ever tell either one of u that if you did not have anything good to say about someone not to say anything at all. OR ALL U BOTH JUST SLOW LEARNERS WHO DID NOT LEARN. talk about pushing the right buttons.heheehe i mean LOL

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"johnoh what do u mean" that your writing style requires us to work much harder to figure out what you are saying than if you wrote in a way that is customary. Its as though your goal is to be the very opposite of concise and lucid. I feel that this is somewhat offensive. that you sound confident yet have many erroneous assertions, or at least, extraneous assertions. This is the opposite of what an engineer or scientist aims for. I do not mean this as a personal attack. I suppose my comment was in reaction to my perception that you were grandstanding.

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johnoh is the rational police

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1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes has nothing what so ever to do with how many bits are in a byte. If a byte were divided into 20 bits it wouldn't make a Kilobyte any bigger or smaller in terms of how many bytes it is. If you had 1000 apples in a basket and wanted to say that is a kiloApple basket(kilo meaning 1000 in most math except binary coding), then would it matter how big the apples were? No, if they were 2 ounces or 4 ounces you would still have a kiloApple basket because there are still 1000 apples in there. The basket would probably be 2 times heavier but that doesn't change the fact that it's still a kiloApple basket. This is my theory, am I wrong?

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ok, have to yield to the police. No, dumass u are not wrong in that theory, the kilobasket is still a kilo basket but yes it would be 2 times heavier, ie take more space! no? a bigger basket but still a kilo basket? so for the same size basket you could not fit the same number of larger apples than the smaller ones? so it would seem that the larger apple basket would contain less apples? maybe same weight but less apples, ie same with the hard drive. the 9 bit bytes hard drive would contain less bytes! of course with only one bit difference it might not "seem like its smaller" same in bytes, 8 or 9 but the 9 bit byte would be "heaiver" ie take more space. A bigger basket, ie a larger hard drive so the hard drive would be "smaller" overall size yet still have the same number of kilobytes. and BTW, 8 bits per byte is not the only one out there. Mainly it depends on the accumulator, ie storage unit, "hardware". In the early days they were smaller,ie 4 bits to a byte. Motorola made some different ones, intel others, we have "settled" for 8 bits to a byte. who knows in the future it might change.

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I agree what you're saying that the basket would have to be bigger or heavier with bigger apples. But, that is not the subject of this thread. The subject is why is 1K=1024 in Windows and 1000 on a hard drive box. 8 bits or 9 bits per byte does not pertain in this case. Here's my experiment to back me up. I'll round off to the nearest digit to the right of the decimal point. I have a old computer that I fired up and it has(says the hard drive manufacturer) a 20 gig hard drive. Windows reports it to have a total space of 20,019,331,072 bytes and Windows says that's 18.6 GB. I took 20,019,331,072 /1024/1024/1024 and it come out to 18.6 which windows reported it. Then I took 20,019,331,072 /1000/1000/1000 and it came out to the 20 that the hard drive manufacturer reported it. Now I took your theory that one calculates 8 bits per byte and the other calculates 9 bits per byte. I thought this might be right also so I took 20 * 8/9 and came out with 17.8 which is close to the 18.6 but not close enough to call it right because the other two numbers are darn near exact.

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Hello, I have over 20 years of experience and 8 bits = 1 byte, 1 kilobyte = 1024 'period'. Anything else is advertising. If you read the 'fine' print, many advertisers give themselves an 'out' by saying there using the 1000 value. Long ago, people figured they needed 128 numbers '7 bits' to represent all the letters upper and lower case, numbers, symbols, etc. Then it was decided to add 1 more bit for a simple form of error correct such as add a 0 or 1 to always have even parity (networks where not as reliable back then) BUT we still use this simple form of error control when you set up a dial-up setting the parity to even or odd. Levi Patrick II The I.T. Doctor, Inc. www.TheITDoctor.com

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Gotta love the new feature where the home page has all the larger posts...I never knew how many great topics I was missing out on in the programming and web development forum :-) I think the 1000 vs 1024 topic has been sufficiently covered, but I wanted to clarify this parity business and the digital/analog heresy set forth by myardor. A good definition of parity: "In communications, a simple form of error checking that uses an extra, or redundant bit, after the data bits but before the stop bit(s). Parity may be set to odd, even, mark, space, or none. Odd parity indicates that the sum of all the 1 bits in the byte plus the parity bit must be odd. If the total is already odd, the parity bit is set to zero; if it is even, the parity bit is set to 1. In even parity, the sum of all the 1 bits is even, the parity bit must be set to 1; if it is odd, the parity bit must be set to 0." http://www.angelfire.com/ny3/diGi8tech/PGlossary.html I've never used the mark or space parities, so I left out that part of the definition. The only thing I wanted to clarify is that parity, baud, and bits are terms usually associated with communication between computers (modem, network, etc.) and not with hard drives or memory. Secondly, It's a pet peeve of mine when people think of analog as anything that isn't digital. A nice definition of analog: "Describes any device that represents changing values by a continuously variable physical property such as voltage in a circuit, fluid pressure, liquid level, and so on. An analog device can handle an infinite number of values within its range. By contrast, a digital device can only manage a fixed number of possible values. For example, an ordinary mercury thermometer is an analog device, and can record an infite number of readings over its range. A digital thermometer, on the other hand, can only display temperature in a fixed number of individual steps. A method of signal representation by an infinitely smooth universe of numeric values. Measurements that are characterized as analog include readings of voltage and current." www.angelfire.com/ny3/diGi8tech/A.html So, as you can see, measuring distance has absolutely nothing to do with analog, and analog vs. digital has absolutely nothing to do with 1000 vs 1024. I don't mean to make this a personal attack, but if myardor is a qualified engineer in any technical field, then I'll eat my underwear. -SN

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