Ask HN: Storage Pricing: GB vs. GiB

2 points

9 years ago

According to the SI system, Colin Percival and hard-drive vendors, for anything other than memory, i.e. for storage, 1 GB = 10^9 bytes (http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html).

Yet, most cloud providers continue to insist for billing purposes, that 1 GB = 2^30 bytes, even for recently launched projects:

"Project storage usage and bandwidth usage are calculated in gigabytes (GB), where 1GB is 2^30 bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB). Similarly, 1TB is 2^40 bytes, i.e. 1024 GBs." - https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=54521

Surely it's time that pricing pages show 1 GB = 10^9 or else use GiB if they mean 2^30?

If you were designing a pricing page for a new storage solution, would you use 1 GB = 10^9? Why or why not?

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