PART TWO of: creation of ext4 filesystem takes 20+ hours???

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 28 Oct 2022 at 07:15, Marco Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

[...]

> if I launch gparted when running in live mode, it says /dev/sda is
> 298.09 GB (not 320)

There are two kinds of units of computer storage: real units, and
marketing units.

Real units use binary round numbers: 1024 bytes = 1 kiB, 1024 kiB = 1
MiB, 1024 MiB = 1 GiB, 1024 GiB = 1 TiB, etc.

These are pronounced kibibytes, mebibytes, etc.

Decades later, the marketing lizards got powerful and started to bring
their lies to computers.

Marketing units use SI units instead because it makes the disks sound bigger.

1000 bytes = 1 kB ≈ 0.97 kiB
1000 kB =  1 MB ≈ 0.95 MiB
1000 MB = 1 GB ≈ 0.93 GiB
1000 GB = 1 TB ≈ 0.90 TiB

Note that the difference grows and grows, so this looks increasingly
good in advertising.

Techies use binary values. Sadly the older techie definitions haven't
been updated everywhere so when you see MB it might mean real units,
now called MiB, or fake marketing units, which took over the old
abbreviation of MB and redefined it.

You are confusing MiB and MB, GiB and GB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units

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