Conky- up/down speed

[blur xc]

what's a kib? Is that the same as kb/s?

thanks,
BM

[Sarai the Geek]

KB = 1,000 bytes
KiB = 1,024 bytes

It's sort of a long story as to why, but they are slightly different. kb/s or kib/s is just the number of kilobytes (however you define it) of data that's being downloaded or uploaded in a given second. Kind of like kilometers per hour or meters per second. It's a speed.

[blur xc]

Thanks for the clarification... makes sense.

BM

[Sarai the Geek]

Thanks for the clarification... makes sense.

Haha, well... not really. Basically, a long time ago someone decided to round 1024 down to 1000 to make it a KB, but then later consumers started getting upset because storage device manufacturers and operating systems reported sizes differently, to make a long story short they then chose to differentiate between KB and KiB for clarity's sake. Lot of good that did, right?
But anyway... I should mention that KB is technically written kilobyte and KiB is kibibyte. :)
You will also see GB/GiB, for the same reason.

[blur xc]

I feel like I might have known that some time ago, vaguely...

Quick question- is that why my 500gig hdd only has 450gigs of available space? Or is it because that 10% is file allocation tables and junk?

I used to be all up on this stuff back in high school- but then at some point I gave up on computers, never touched one for years, and when I did- I did as just a dumb computer user... So, it's been like 15yrs and I'm trying to get back in touch with my geek side.

BM

[Sarai the Geek]

Yep, it is. I looked it up so I'd have exact figures, and this is what I found:


Here is a quick reference to show the amount that the actual values differ compared to the advertised for each common referenced value:


Megabyte Difference = 48,576 Bytes
Gigabyte Difference = 73,741,824 Bytes
Terabyte Difference = 99,511,627,776 Bytes

Based on this, for each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly 70.3 MB of disk space. So, if a manufacturer advertises an 80 GB (80 billion bytes) hard drive, the actual disk space is around 74.5 GB of space, roughly 7% less than what they advertised.

[source (http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm)]

On a large hard drive, that can add up.

[Greenwidth]

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