This sort of misrepresentation should be outright illegal.
Why does it feel like big corporations are just getting more blatantly evil these days?
Why does it feel like big corporations are just getting more blatantly evil these days?
The 'confusion' as to whether the "K" prefix meant a factor of 10^3 or 2^10 goes back decades.
In 1961 a book says "it is more usual to express the speed in bits or kilobits (1,000 bits) per second"; an IBM 1410 manual says ""The 40K core array requires 40,000 valid five-position addresses from 0,000 to 39,999." In 1962 an ACM paper referred to a "4K IBM 1401" which had 4000 characters of storage, but in 1964 Amdahl wrote a paper that had 1K meaning 1024. Academics went back and forth a bit it seems.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes
For hard drives specifically, a 1974 example has Mbytes in the 10^6 sense. Further examples often have drives using the base-10 sense of the prefix (including the first 5 ¼ inch floppy), while memory chips using the base-2 sense of the prefix.
The powers-of-1024 nomenclature of kibi/mebi/etc was introduced in 1995, with IEEE mandating SI prefixes only be used for powers-of-1000 in 1997. The IEC follows suit a couple of years later.
That's easy to explain, as a 1401 is actually a decimal computer.
> In the 1950s, "1 kilobit" meant 1000 bits:[9][10]
Because hard drives, going back to the original (the IBM 350), have used decimal prefixes.
Given what this article is about, I don't know why you're giving HD manufacturers the benefit of the doubt.
None of those mitigating/confounding factors apply to RPM, so the current lies are more blatant.
(Though it does seem somewhat relevant to point out here that a "500GB" drive usually has an accessible capacity of 500,107,862,016 bytes, implying an effective definition of 1GB=1,000,215,724 bytes, which is neither 1024^3 bytes nor 10^9, nor 10^9 rounded up to the nearest whole (binary-sized) sector. And that effective GB definition varies with drive capacity.)
KB = Kilobyte, which from SI definition of kilo means 10^3.
KiB = Kibibyte, was formaly defined later by IEC in 1998 as 2^10
OSes (Windows/Mac/Linux), are the ones doing it wrong, using 2^10 internaly, but presenting using SI prefixes.