
Ask HN: Storage Pricing: GB vs. GiB - jorangreef
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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tarsnap.com&#x2F;GB-why.html).<p>Yet, most cloud providers continue to insist for billing purposes, that 1 GB = 2^30 bytes, even for recently launched projects:<p>&quot;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.&quot; - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;storage&#x2F;pricing
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;message.jspa?messageID=54521<p>Surely it&#x27;s time that pricing pages show 1 GB = 10^9 or else use GiB if they mean 2^30?<p>If you were designing a pricing page for a new storage solution, would you use 1 GB = 10^9? Why or why not?
======
wmf
AFAIK, storage hardware was always rated in 10^9 while storage software (file
sizes, etc.) always used 2^30 [1]. So the cloud is just continuing this
problem.

[1] recent versions of OS X being the exception

