this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Are you ok mate?
They're not wrong. 1000 GB is a terabyte, so 512 GB is over half a terabyte.
It's exactly half a tebibyte though.
That's a retcon of hardware producers using measurement units confusion to advertise less as more.
It's nice to have consistent units naming, but when the industry has existed for a long enough time with the old ones, seems intentional harm for profit.
How is it a retcon? The use of giga- as a prefix for 10^9^ has been in use as part of the metric system since 1960. I don’t think anyone in the fledgeling computer industry was talking about giga- or mega- anything at that time. The use of mega- as a prefix for 10^6^ has been in use since 1873, over 60 years before Claude Shannon even came up with the concept of a digital computer.
if anything, the use of mega- and giga- to mean 1024 is a retcon over previous usage.