Snow Leopard: Base 10 data storage. Explain.

You may have heard that OSX 10.6 'finally' uses base-10 to read storage mediums, so a 4GB flash drive has 4GB of adre4ssable space, not the standard 3.74 (because of the use of Base-2, thus reading 1GB as 1024E+6).

I understand how this works mostly, I just want to know why so many people find this as a negative feature. To me this would be a good thing, as I would get 29GB back out of my 1 TB drive.


Can anyone help me out?

From my reading on it, I dont think anything has changed except for the way that it reports the sizes. Reports sizes in base 10, but that's it.

I could be wrong though, anyone else know?

x30Jx said:

You may have heard that OSX 10.6 'finally' uses base-10 to read storage mediums, so a 4GB flash drive has 4GB of adre4ssable space, not the standard 3.74 (because of the use of Base-2, thus reading 1GB as 1024E+6).

I understand how this works mostly, I just want to know why so many people find this as a negative feature. To me this would be a good thing, as I would get 29GB back out of my 1 TB drive.


Can anyone help me out?

Click to expand...

Because you are not really getting anymore space back. Just the size of the reported "Gigabyte" is smaller.


In base 10 a kilobyte is 1000 Bytes. In base 2 a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. (Also known as a Kibibyte or binary kilobyte) Moving up to a Megabyte, it is 1024 Kibibytes. Most operating systems report in Base 2, while HDD manufacturers report in base 10. (this is pure marketting schtick as most HDD utilities I have seen also report in base2)

Size of the disk does not change only the reported number changes. Same exact amount of data is held.

Now if improvements have been made on the file structure itself you could theoretically reduce some of the other head, but you are talking hundredths of a percent difference. From what I have seen on other File systems.