Can we add some info on binary sizes (versus SI)

[Jay-o-Way]

Hey. As we know, Microsoft/Windows still uses a shady way to "name" sizes of bytes. What I mean is the different between 2^x and 10^x bytes: often the prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi should be used where actually K, M, G are used. Can we add some info here on what Microsoft exactly means when they say "GB" and such?

I'll leave the discussion on the values shown in the OS for a different department ;)

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• ID: 07e38549-2cfa-3793-745b-78fa30b2f8ed
• Version Independent ID: affdae42-c0f2-fda3-9fbf-14b0dab067ef
• Content: Bits and bytes terms - Microsoft Style Guide
• Content Source: styleguide/a-z-word-list-term-collections/term-collections/bits-bytes-terms.md
• Product: non-product-specific
• GitHub Login: @pallep
• Microsoft Alias: pallep

[S-LRaillard]

Hi @Jay-o-Way and thanks for the feedback. Your tech understanding surpasses mine because I had to research the different between base 10 and base 2 gigabytes! However, I'm not sure how to address this in the MWSG, as we are primarily not in the business of defining terms, just setting editorial guidelines for how to use them. I'll look around and see if there is another resource that I can leverage to address this issue.

[Jay-o-Way]

Thanks for the reply. Short story is: 10^2 = 1000 and 2^10 = 1024. A long, long time ago these were mixed up, meaning a kilobyte is/was 1024 bytes, while "kilo" should mean 1000. Nowadays, we invented the term kibibytes. Not even talking about the combination of the two types mentioned on storage devices... A message like

"kilobytes" means {1000/1024} bytes in Windows.

could suffice?