Please look at the numbers in the article again.
The old drive had 16 billion usable bytes. The new drive has 15.4 billion.
Base 2 has nothing to do with this problem.
The old drive had 16 billion usable bytes. The new drive has 15.4 billion.
Base 2 has nothing to do with this problem.
> [...] Operating Systems define 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 BYTES.
Mac OS, iOS, Ubuntu, and Debian operating systems at the very least all use base 10 for representing disk and storage space.
Linux (to include Android) and the BSDs (to include MacOS, and iOS?) use GB (gigabytes) to mean decimal GB (gigabytes), a conversion factor basically noone in the real world adopted because multiples of 1000 are meaningless.
So the vast majority of people and Windows to this day understand a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, a megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, and so on. Meanwhile, Linux and the BSDs and drive manufacturers/vendors understand a kilobyte as 1000 bytes, a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes, and so on because it's pedantically correct (and the conversion factors are commercially convenient).
This dissonance in understanding leads to endless "why is my drive smaller than what's printed on the box?" complaints.
As I undertood it, that tidbit comes from Sandisk and probably targets Windows user. I also believe Windows does (or did) use base 2 for file and disk sizes