Most annoying creature OS in the world

GiB weren’t invented by drive manufacturers (although they definitely benefit from it, and are incredibly scummy about it). It was invented by the SI people. GiB make sense, because the prefix “Giga” means 10⁶, while in binary it meant 2²⁰. It was a mess before, and GiB just standardized it in a way that is easy to understand and consistent with other units.

I do think we should force drive manufacturers to express their drive capacity in binary format, tho.

All software has always interpreted it in binary as far as I know. There never was a good standard, and the most common way to differentiate in my experience was using KB as metric (decimal, SI) and K as binary. It’s easy to confuse with the already convoluted standard of KB being a kilobyte and Kb being a kilobit.

The reason for the added “i” is that in every other system, kilo means 1000. Someone at the SI realized that it didn’t make any sense to have it mean something different in software so they invented the Ki prefix (instead of K) to mean 1024. That is now the standard, and it’s part of the SI (coloquially metric). As a consequence of this, you can technically use the Ki prefix with any other SI unit, so you can also use the KiM (kibimeter), which is 1024 meters. Idk why you’d use it, but it’s funny that the option exists.

It will work fine, the issue is drive degradation. Especially if you don’t have a lot of ram, swap will be used a lot. SSDs degrade with writes, so swapping on them reduces their life. This is especially noticeable on old or cheap SSDs, which tend to degrade faster. One example is those 8GB RAM macs with soldered 256GB SSDs, which due to cheap and small SSDs and low RAM were breaking really quickly.

If your SSDs have a lot if space, they are relatively new and you have a lot of RAM (32 GB is perfectly fine), you won’t have much issue. If you’re worried about it, you can always check drive health with smartctl

There are (mainly) 3 reasons for that:

• TB vs TiB: Computers don’t count drive space in metric units, they count it in powers of 2. This means that, for you, 1 TB is 1000 GB, while for a computer, 1 TiB is 1024 GiB. Drive manufactirers take advantage of this, and only count space in metric (TB). So when you plug the drive into your computer, and it converts to GiB, you end up with 1 TB = 931.3 GiB. Windows hasn’t helped this confusion, I remember it doing something weird like counting in GiB and displaying it as GB.

• Reserved space: Many OSes reserve some space on their drives for special stuff. This is especially the case with Linux and ext4, where it by default reserves a percentage of the drive to root. This is to optimize distribution of files around the disk, which limits fragmentation. The system slowly frees more of this space as you fill up the disk, and at the end it should leave you with 100% of the space.

• Formatting: Empty drive space isn’t the same as usable drive space. In order to use a drive you need to format it, which doesn’t just blank it. Formatting a drive adds a filesystem to it, which is what allows you to write files and folders to it. This filesystem takes up some space, and reserves more space for inodes and, in some cases, a filesystem journal. Some filesystems have even more features that also take up some space.

All of the energy that does calculations gets turned into heat. The only energy that doesn’t get directly turned into heat is the mechanical energy produced by the fans (which ends up turning into heat), and the electromagnetic radiation (which also ends up turning into heat).

If the calculations didn’t convert energy into heat, a computer would essentially use no power. You can think of a computer like a really complex wire. The power consumption you see is actually the heat loss of that wire. The less heat you lose, the more efficient the wire is.

High Dairy Milk Ingestion

You can’t eat 1kg of apples, only .5kg before it goes bad. So you give the other .5kg away. Melsaskca also can’t eat another .5kg of potatoes, so they give them away.

I got a 16TB HDD for 300€, yesterday I looked at it and it was 800€ (apparently discounted from 1000€ lol)

Indeed he is. Had the misfortune of seeing some of it.