The Exbibyte Wars Are Coming

[beamjockey]

As someone whose workplace is concerned with inverse femtobarns, I am somewhat aware of the importance of standard prefixes for very small or very large numbers.

In the article about puppies killing the Internet, the reference to a "zettabyte" got me thinking about prefixes we use for big binary numbers like kilobytes and megabytes. Turns out

Comments

[akirlu]

Any chance of your putting the graphic behind a cut?

[beamjockey]

I have done so, as a favor to you. But I was careful to make the picture small. It is a GIF of only 12 kilobytes-- I mean, 12 kibibytes-- so I would not ordinarily expect it to be a burden on your system.

[akirlu]

It's not a burden to my system per se, but the graphic is buggering the heck out of my friends page. Larger format images (irrespective of file size) tend to do that.

[johnridley]

What's the date on that article? Because PC file sizes are already measured in terabytes. Or tebibytes, makes no matter. A cheap laptop drive these days is have a T. I don't bother setting up a machine with less than a TB drive, there's just no point, since a TB drive is about $75, and half that is $65. 2T drives are about $100.

I know I'm an outlier on the bell curve, but I have a data tank in the living room with a 6TB RAID array. But 1TB in a new machine is common.