“They call me Mister TiB’s!”
Hi all
In the heat of the night, we had a new calculator release. This recent update (v1.1.0) to the calculators saw us change labeling from TiB’s (Tebibytes) to TB’s (Terabytes). This would be a pretty big change in terms of sizing (maybe 10% or more at volume), so what gives?
The answer is pretty simple: vendors can’t agree on a standard, and hold to a tradition of mislabeling! I won’t bore you with the history, but a quick web search (warning: Reddit can be a dark place) will show you that a fairly arbitrary decision was made at the dawn of modern computing that led to confusion. Some blame marketing. Compute values went one way, storage values (mostly) went another.
For a discussion on the difference between the two values check out this post from one of our Vanguards. The tl;dr is that TiB’s are base-2 while TB’s are base-10. In other words 1 TiB is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes while 1 TB is 1 trillion bytes.
The problem is that most vendors (including Veeam, VMware, Microsoft) use the label TB when the amount is actually measured in TiB. If you are on a Windows system right now, take a wee look at the disk size. Says “TB” right? But the values are actually TiBs i.e. sets of 1024 GiB’s rather than 1000 GB’s.
Veeam uses TiB as the storage standard on the backend because that’s what almost all OS and storage vendors use, but all the labels in the UI say TB. The same applies to Microsoft, VMware and almost every other storage vendor (I think Pure stuck to their technical guns and label TiB - kudos to the Pure guys).
When we started the calculator project, we wanted to be accurate, so used TiB labels. The calculator team got enough complaints and questions on “what is a TiB”, “why use TiB”, “why not use TB like the Veeam UI” that they relented and changed the labeling.
So..., the labels say TB. The calculations and the numbers are TiB. Just like the rest of the industry.
