# Cheated by the CPU companies??
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [June 6, 2001, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851 "2001-06-06T22:59:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kgriffey79](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kgriffey79)
#### Post date: [June 6, 2001, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/1 "2001-06-06T22:59:50Z")
Are we being lied to by the hard disk manufacturers? A kilobyte has 1024bytes right?? or 2^10. mega is 1048576bytes or 2^10. Giga is 1073741824bytes or 2^20. Terra is 1099511627776bytes or 2^10. A petabye and so on…to yottabyte. Okay, but they are selling these to as in powers of 10. A Kilobyte to them is 1000 (10^3). A megabyte to them is 10^6 or 1,000,000. As hard drives get larger and larger, they will be stealing more and more memory. Shouldnt they be telling the truth?? Although technically a kilo is 1000, it is universally known as 1024.
Well, are they stealing or not?? Most ppl dont know they arent getting what they have paid for, right?
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### Author:  [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)
#### Post date: [June 6, 2001, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/2 "2001-06-06T23:38:54Z")
If you read their literature you will see they say they define one Meg as 10^6 etc. so I guess only the illiterate can claim they were defrauded. And why would the illiterate be buying hard drives anyway?
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### Author:  [@kgriffey79](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kgriffey79)
#### Post date: [June 6, 2001, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/3 "2001-06-06T23:54:59Z")
I dont think the illiterate know what a kilobyte is unless you are calling me illiterate…
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### Author:  [@jmonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jmonster)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2001, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/4 "2001-06-07T00:09:32Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by kgriffey79 \*
> \*\*Are we being lied to by the hard disk manufacturers?
> \*\*
Yes. But the cool thing about living in a free market system (as I do and as I presume you do) is that everything costs exactly what it’s worth. And since all the hard drive manufacturers use the base 10 system, you can easily compare sizes and prices. Just put the whole base 2 thing out of your head.
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### Author:  [@handy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handy)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2001, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/5 "2001-06-07T14:10:41Z")
There are Eight bits to the byte…not ten bits to the byte. Thus, figure it out yourself, a megabyte translates to mega x (eight bits)…la da da
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### Author:  [@SmackFu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmackFu)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2001, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/6 "2001-06-07T14:28:29Z")
It’s just conflicting definitions. The OS uses one, the hard drive manufacturer uses another. Neither one is intrinsically “correct”.
Although I’d argue that the hard drive maker’s one is better, since it matches the SI standards. A kilometer is 1000 meters, a megawatt is a million watts, etc. So a megabyte should be a million bytes, not 2^10.
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### Author:  [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2001, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/7 "2001-06-07T14:34:40Z")
kgriffey79, meet handy, handy meet kgriffey79. You guys are gonna have fun. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2001, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/8 "2001-06-07T22:44:38Z")
Hey, not only that, but you buy a 10 Gig hard drive and by the time you’ve partitioned and formatted it, there’s only 9 and a bit Gig left, it’s a damn conspiracy, start stockpiling firearms and canned food now.
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### Author:  [@handy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handy)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2001, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/9 "2001-06-07T23:43:23Z")
I for one, don’t mind that little missing %.
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### Author:  [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/10 "2001-06-08T00:00:32Z")
The friendly folks at NIST have addressed this problem. They propose the following solution: (see [NIST Binary Prefixes](http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html))
Value Name (origin) Abbr
1024 = kibi ( **ki** lo **bi** nary) Ki
1024^2 = mebi ( **me** ga **bi** nary) Mi
1024^3 = gibi ( **gi** ga **bi** nary) Gi
So, my computer actually has 256 GiB of RAM, not 256 Gb. And my harddrive really is 40 GB. Personally, I think the NIST system is silly, but at least they’re trying.
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### Author:  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/11 "2001-06-08T00:10:22Z")
I suppose you could make the case for corporate greed and illicit misrepresentation, but it’s also possible that folks just throw computer terms around without much accuracy. You know, like referring to producers of hard drives as CPU companies, referring to the amount of storage space on hard drives as “memory”, that kind of thing 😉
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### Author:  [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/12 "2001-06-08T01:41:10Z")
My computer has 10,000 gigagiggles … or is that gigglegigas? gigagoogles? now I’m not sure… but it’s got _something_. Of that I am quite certain. 😉
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### Author:  [@Doughboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doughboy)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/13 "2001-06-08T02:26:15Z")
I had no idea that a kilobyte isn’t just 10^3 bytes. I thought the prefix kilo, mega, etc. meant 10^3, 10^6, etc. It’s possible that they are just selling them in the units most people would understand. I think most people who aren’t familiar with the electronics would assume that kilo meant 1000 and so on because I think this is the only arena I’ve seen that doesn’t use the prefixes in their normal way.
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### Author:  [@Timchik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Timchik)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/14 "2001-06-08T06:55:17Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Pleonast \*
> \*\*So, my computer actually has 256 GiB of RAM, not 256 Gb. And my harddrive really is 40 GB. Personally, I think the NIST system is silly, but at least they’re trying.
> \*\*
Your computer has 256 GiB of RAM? Boy howdy, you must be able to handle some monster big Photoshop files 😉
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/15 "2001-06-08T08:04:41Z")
Bear in mind that the term Kilobyte was coined at a time when it was thought of as a _large_ amount and Gigabyte was a term that we would never need because it was the stuff of SF.
So in the early days, the discrepancy was 24 bytes; big deal, they thought.
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### Author:  [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 11:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/16 "2001-06-08T11:32:37Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Your computer has 256 GiB of RAM? Boy howdy, you must be able to handle some monster big Photoshop files 🙂
Err, that’s 256 MiB of RAM, of course. My brain is obviously not so well equipped. 🙂
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### Author:  [@xizor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xizor)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/17 "2001-06-08T14:14:18Z")
The hard drive thing is nothing compared to the monitor rip off that is going on. When you buy a 21 inch monitor and fail to see the fine print that says “18.9 inch viewable”. That I feel is more of a scandal than a few kilobytes off a hard drive.
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### Author:  [@Cumber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cumber)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/18 "2001-06-08T14:32:07Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Mangetout \*
> \*\*Bear in mind that the term Kilobyte was coined at a time when it was thought of as a _large_ amount and Gigabyte was a term that we would never need because it was the stuff of SF.
>
> So in the early days, the discrepancy was 24 bytes; big deal, they thought. \*\*
In the days when a kilobyte was a large amount of data, 24 bytes probably _would_ have been a big deal. Or not negligable anyway. In fact I would think probably would have to do with small numbers of bytes being important… since computers use base 2 it’s always going to be a pain to express computer-significant numbers precisely in decimal. How do you get around that problem? Base your terminology around computer-significant stuff rather than the number of fingers you’ve got. Close enough for people who aren’t in the buisiness anyway.
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### Author:  [@handy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handy)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/19 "2001-06-08T15:20:03Z")
Everywhere I read on the net it says the reason they call it like a 2 gig HD is because ‘2’ is the closest number.
What on earth does this have to do with ‘CPU companies?’ CPU companies don’t have anything to do with HD or memory size.
CPU= central processing unit, duh.
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### Author:  [@Running\_with\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Running_with_Scissors)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2001, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/20 "2001-06-08T15:38:18Z")
I concur with the OP; I believe at one point the HD manufacturers were trying to pull a fast one. At least now the capacity they list is **actual** capacity, rather than the **unformatted** capacity they used to list in the bad old days. There is no technical reason that hard drive manufacturers shouldn’t use the same terminology that memory manufacturers use, but at least all the HD manufacturers use the same system.
Anyone remember back about 15 years ago, Atari made a 1MB machine, but called it the 1040ST, because it had 1,040 Kbytes of memory (or something to that effect).
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