1 GB = how many MBs?

willietherock

Needto know how much broadband cap Ive left to use this month?

Ruu_Old

1gb=1024mb.

zilog_jones

It depends how they measure it - it could be 1024MB or 1000MB.

pushpop

Yes, that's quite correct. If you look at it from a purely mathematical perspective, 1GB is 1024 megabytes, but a lot of computer manufacturers and internet providers state it as 1000 in the small print, which is a loss of about 2.5%.

Dirty feckers :mad:

Creamy Goodness

isn't 1000 a gigabyte and 1024 a gibibyte?

pushpop

It depends on the context - network folks refer to gigabytes as 10 to the power of 9 bytes, whereas Microsoft and programmers, component manufacturers refer to it as 2 to the power of 30 bytes.

Khannie

I've always considered it 8*1024^3 (KB,MB,GB)....partly because.....

Cremo wrote:

isn't 1000 a gigabyte

If this were strictly true, where giga is 10^9, it would be 8,000,000,000 bits, which is a long way short of 8,589,934,592 (8*1024^3). This would also make a megabyte 8,000,000 bits, which I don't think any of us believe is correct. If there's a 1024 in there somewhere, it should be used exclusively.

Hard drive manufacturers are therefore, IMO, lying scum.

Static M.e.

Hard drive manufacturers are therefore, IMO, lying scum

Ditto, its quite annoying explaining the fact too

Nalz

one gigabyte is 1024 mega bytes.

deireadh leis an scéal

pushpop

Heh,

Well if you've only a gig left from your cap, perhaps take it easy ;-)

A good program I use on my Windows machine is DU Meter, it keeps track of your broadband usage and you can set it up to notify you when a certain amount of data has been downloaded in a given day/week/month. Unfortunately, my cap is a poxy 12GB so I have mine set to warn me if I download more than 3GB a week.

peepsbates

pushpop wrote:

Heh,

Well if you've only a gig left from your cap, perhaps take it easy ;-)

A good program I use on my Windows machine is DU Meter, it keeps track of your broadband usage and you can set it up to notify you when a certain amount of data has been downloaded in a given day/week/month. Unfortunately, my cap is a poxy 12GB so I have mine set to warn me if I download more than 3GB a week.

not much use though with wii and 360:)

aidan_walsh

peepsbates wrote:

not much use though with wii and 360:)

Nope. Also, I found DU Meter tends to read things that don't really go through the network card at all, like if a service sets up as a server to read calls from local applications, DU Meter (at least last version of it I used) tends to read those as well.

jor el

willietherock wrote:

Needto know how much broadband cap Ive left to use this month?

Roughly 1000 MBs anyway. I guess it doesn't matter today as it's a new month but if your provider is eircom or BT then don't worry about it.

Cremo wrote:

gibibyte

Never use that word :mad: It was only invented by hard disk (and DVDR) manufacturers so they could re-define kB, MB and GB to their own advantage.*




* May not be true, but it's how I like to think of it.

andrew

i use the network monitor available from http://www.kctoolbox.tk/ to tell me how much bandwidth used. Its really helpful, divides data in to how much used per day/week/month

andy1249

All this was discussed before on this thread ,

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055056603


For the record ,

SI prefixes were around and correctly being used by hard drive manufacturers long before Computer Heads started misusing SI prefixes such as Giga , Mega , kilo to incorrectly refer to binary prefixes and powers of two.

So its not the hard drive and component manufacturers who are abusing the count , its the IT people that are doing that , and as usual with us IT people , we always think were right and everyone else is wrong. ( I include myself in this as I used these terms incorrectly for years before I looked it up and found out I was wrong! )

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cremo
gibibyte

Never use that word It was only invented by hard disk (and DVDR) manufacturers so they could re-define kB, MB and GB to their own advantage.*

Hard drive and DVDR manufacturers have redefined nothing , hard drive manufacturers have always used Mega , Giga , Tera etc. correctly , its the operating systems and Computer people who have incorrectly used or redifined it !!
( linux reports it correctly though , at least Ubuntu does )

Gibi , Mibi , Kibi etc.were officially made the standard for binary prefixes in 1997 , there was never a standard before that. Just a common abuse of SI units!!

Cantab.

pushpop wrote:

...If you look at it from a purely mathematical perspective, 1GB is 1024 megabytes...

Tripe. From purely mathematical perspective 1G byte = 10^9 bytes. Similarly, 1M byte = 10^6 bytes, 1k byte = 10^3 bytes.

The common knowledge of 1 Gigabyte being equal to 1024MB is plainly wrong. It's just a mathematical coincidence that the binary number system and powers of ten cross over each other (to within 2.5%) at 2^10.

i.e. 2^10 is 1024 ~=10^9 (or 1 Gbyte).

Now if we apply this logic to another scenario.

e.g. 2^14= 16,348. There is no powers of ten relationship here, nor is there for any other power of 2 (that my pocket calculator can handle anyway).

Boston

Cantab. wrote:

Tripe. From purely mathematical perspective 1G byte = 10^9 bytes. Similarly, 1M byte = 10^6 bytes, 1k byte = 10^3 bytes.

The common knowledge of 1 Gigabyte being equal to 1024MB is plainly wrong. It's just a mathematical coincidence that the binary number system and powers of ten cross over each other (to within 2.5%) at 2^10.

i.e. 2^10 is 1024 ~=10^9 (or 1 Gbyte).

Now if we apply this logic to another scenario.

e.g. 2^14= 16,348. There is no powers of ten relationship here, nor is there for any other power of 2 (that my pocket calculator can handle anyway).

You know nothing about computer architecture.

Cantab.

Boston wrote:

You know nothing about computer architecture.

Ok then, 2^30. It's still an anomoly. But it's wholly incorrect to say that "from a purely mathematical perspective, 1GB is 1024 megabytes..." a la PushPop

Khannie

1KB has always been, and will always be 1024 * 8 bits. Edit: I consider it separate from the SI system tbh.

Let's keep it nice on this thread lads.

Alun

Well actually ... (from Wikipedia)

Originally a byte was chosen to be a submultiple of the computer's word size, anywhere from six to nine bits (a character encoding was then fitted into this unit). The popularity of IBM's System/360 architecture starting in the 1960s and the explosion of microprocessors based on 8-bit microprocessors in the 1980s has made obsolete any meaning other than 8 bits. The term octet is widely used as a more precise synonym where ambiguity is undesirable (for example, in protocol definitions).

In fact, I worked on a CII-Honeywell Bull mainframe waaay back when that had a 36-bit word and packed 4 9-bit 'bytes' into one word. Note that addressing was at word level, so the individual bytes weren't directly addressable and had to be extracted etc. using low level assembler instructions. Those were the days

GrumPy

Cremo wrote:

isn't 1000 a gigabyte and 1024 a gibibyte?

Your not serious?

Alun

Irish GrumPy wrote:

Your not serious?

No, he's right (strictly speaking). Read the following Wiki article ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte. Nobody uses it in practice though, much like 'octets' unless you're fond of reading CCITT or ITU documents.

pickarooney

Alun wrote:

Nobody uses it in practice though, much like 'octets' unless you're fond of reading CCITT or ITU documents.

or French.

seamus

Alun wrote:

Nobody uses it in practice though, much like 'octets' unless you're fond of reading CCITT or ITU documents.

It'll eventually find it's way in though I think. We're not that far along yet

Although I would still personally use the traditional wording which says there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, the scientist in my head wants to use Kilo for 1000 and Kibi for 1024, for the sake of consistency.

For the record, hard drive manufacturers have been using Kilo = 1000 for a lot longer than people have been saying kilo = 1024. They're right, you're wrong.