Five dominant themes in the discussion
| # | Theme | Representative quotes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marketing inflation – vendors use 1000‑based units to make drives look larger. | “The entire reason storage vendors prefer 1000‑based kilobytes is so that they could misrepresent and over‑market their storage capacities” – jachee |
| 2 | Technical legacy – SSDs and memory use base‑2 sizes and over‑provisioning. | “SSDs historically have followed base‑2 sizes … you have overprovisioned models that hide a few % of their total size” – dr_zoidberg |
| 3 | Ambiguity & confusion – “kilobyte” means 1000 or 1024 bytes, leading to mixed usage. | “kilobyte will remain an ambiguous term … kibibyte will very often not be used when someone is referring to 1024 bytes” – nerdsniper |
| 4 | Historical evolution – early computers used 1024, later marketing shifted to 1000. | “In 1972, DEC PDP 11/40 handbook said K = 1024” – theamk |
| 5 | Standard‑setting debate – proposals for kibibyte, MiB, etc., and resistance to change. | “Knuth thought the international standard naming for binary kilobytes is dead on arrival” – zephen |
These five threads capture the bulk of the conversation: why the units differ, how they came to be, the confusion they cause, and the ongoing struggle over which terminology to adopt.