Snow Leopard will be counting your files differently.

http://www.macworld.com/article/142471/ ... c=rss_main

I am going to be very, very confused for a while.

That's stupid.

Although it kind of makes it more impressive that even with the "dumbed-down" sizes they can still reduce the overall footprint by 7GB (err... GiB... err whatever).

The hard disk manufacturers switched to 1000^3 over a decade ago and it caused a huge uproar, most people have forgotten about it.

It makes some sense to do it, to be honest, because the "250GB" hard drive is actually nowhere near 250GiB in size... If the user then adds up all the MiB of files on his hard disk, that total number on a full drive won't be much less than the theoretical size of the drive, because the manufacturers use a different numbering scheme.

It is only once the file is in memory (or stored on a flash drive) that base 2 calculations make sense.

ARG! Why can't they do it properly?
I hope they don't medle with the command line, I may find myself there more often to get more reliable readouts...



Have they got this wrong? Surely if a GiB is being used in Leopard (being 1024^3), then that QuickTime file should be larger? In Snow Leopard that same file using GB (being 1000^3) should be smaller? I don't understand the maths...

And does this mean the byte will be rounded up to 10 bits?

No, the math is correct.

The file size has remained the same - 252,916,507 bytes. Divide that by by 1000^3 and you get 252.9MB, divide it by 1024^3 and you get the 241.2MB

No, they are right.

If a file is say 2048 bytes in size (just for easiness) then in Leopard it would be counted as multiples of 1024.

i.e. 2 KB.

in Snow Leopard it would be counted as mutiples of 100.

i.e. 2.048 kb.

i.e. all files in Snow Leopard will be displayed as being larger than in Leopard.

Ah ha! Cheers guys, I was multiplying up rather than dividing down

The same, only different

Good.

Sure, this will be confusing for us at first. But we will all get used to it, and n00bs will prefer it.

One day, Windows will follow and then it will be the new standard.

That's fine by me, although I'd prefer it if they settled on base 2 personally. Still, base 10 all round is better than a mix.

Good luck convincing the HD manufacturers. They'd have to relabel all of their drives and they'd be smaller or increase capacity to get back to what they call them now. 0.976TB doesn't sound quite as catchy as 1TB

If a smart chap like you can be confused, then it's no surprise that Joe Public is.

It wouldn't be so bad if the world could agree on how to represent the different units, but as it stands MB means different things to different people. With mb,Mb,mB,MB.MiB and Mib all being inconsistently used, no one really stands a chance...

Of course, as a geek I feel I should be complaining... but I find the 1024^n notation difficult to defend outside of a lab.