Is there any good reason to refer to large amounts of data in terms of powers of 2? E.g., where 1kB is 1024 bytes (now prop­erly called a kib­i­b­yte) instead of 1000 bytes? People rag on hard drive man­u­fac­tur­ers for deceit­fully list­ing a 320 mil­lion byte capa­city drive as 320GB instead of 300GiB — and I’ll admit there’s undoubtedly some wil­ful deceit going on there — but to be hon­est, using powers of 10 makes a lot more sense to me.

The only instance I can see where using powers of 2 could pos­sibly be bene­fi­cial is when refer­ring exactly to the num­ber of MMU pages or the num­ber of file sys­tem blocks alloc­ated for some­thing, but in those instances I think I would rather say some­thing like “7 pages” than “28k”.

And yes, this is inspired by repar­ti­tion­ing my hard drive and being annoyed at hav­ing to con­vert a num­ber like 202691383296 bytes into gib­i­b­ytes (base 2 giga­bytes) because the tool stu­pidly won’t work with base 10 giga­bytes. Some­times I think people go out of their way to make things more arcane than they need to be.

Is there any good reason to refer to large amounts of data in terms of powers of 2? E.g., where 1kB is 1024 bytes (now properly called a kibibyte) instead of 1000 bytes? People rag on hard drive manufacturers for deceitfully listing a 320 million byte capacity drive as 320GB instead of 300GiB—and I'll ...