I still say the US Office of Weights and Measures should require all computer storage (either RAM or SSD/HD) in the US be measured in base 2 units. This continued base 10 usage in a binary world is confusing and frankly done to rip-off consumers.
Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI is beautiful because it is consistent. The computer industry decided to use standard prefixes with non-standard (base-2) quantities. Now let's cut our losses and return to consistency with everything else.
Exponentially increasing? 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, 10^12
(I kind of hate being that guy, but I mean it in a positive and helpful sense)
Using MiB avoids confusion, misuse, and ambiguity.
Uniformity (what you're also calling "consistency"), if it's even warranted here, would be far lower priority and could wait.
The hardware is using sizes in powers of 2 because it's the only sensible thing to do, and numbers would be very annoying for users if the units didn't account for it.
I say this because most regular folks don’t even know what a gigabyte is so asking them to understand what a gibibyte is does not really “solve the problem” of consumer understanding.
So now there are three standards.
Changing to gibibytes does very little - the users confused by 1024 do not know about the alternate prefixes.
Furthermore, if you just add the "i" to all measurements, then you have accomplished nothing with regards to SI prefix proliferation. Everything but one dialog in a single OS will still use 1024, and HDD manufacturers will still use 1000.
> However, if you think about, it does make sense for the computer to use the same standard as the HD manufacturers.
No, it makes more sense for hard drive manufacturers to stop using a system that artificially inflates their disk size advertisements.
Somehow they're getting away with this.
You could, if you really wanted to, write 1 million raw bytes to the disk. But you'd need special software to read and write it, because de facto software expect there to be a master partitioning table or whatever it's called.
My point was that storage device manufacturers somehow get away with redefining units. No one else does this. Imagine if you bought a 1L bottle of milk, only to see in fine print that "1L = 800 ml".
Storage manufacturers have been using decimal prefixes for decades, you should probably get over it at this point.
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/1mb44-is-not-a-standard-floppy-disc-siz...
Or are they not quite half as wide?