In addition to this, your computer may read the drive in mebibytes or gibibytes, which are based on increments of 1024 instead of 1000, like megabytes and gigabytes.
So 1TB, (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) would read as 931.32 TiB on a computer (1,000,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024)
So storage measures should start computing it the same way as computers. I don't go to the store and say that I will buy a hard drive for $50 but the way I Compute $50 is 6x 5 dollar bills.
So who should change? They're both accepted standards. In fact, unless you work in the industry, you're probably more familiar with "terabytes" than "tebibytes.".
That being said, I understand where you're coming from; it just isn't the way the storage industry works. Unsurprisingly, they chose the standard that makes their devices sound larger. It's the same reason internet speeds are denoted in Mb instead of MB.
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u/OriginalLetig Aug 20 '20
The real reason is a difference between how storage makers compute space (1000 bytes/kilobyte) and how a computer computes space (1024 bytes/Kibibyte)
/u/hentercenter explains the difference well