My basic question is whether Linux based systems use disk measurements based on SI units, where a KB
is a kilobyte, is equal to 1000 bytes (103), or based on the bastardized approximation in base 2, where a KB
really means kibibyte (which should actually be abbreviated as KiB
) and is equal to 1024 bytes (210).
It comes up because I'm in the process of installing and configuring a new Avamar backup system (woohoo!), and licensing is based on used storage. It's a disk-to-disk backup system built on Linux, so our ultimate licensing needs (and benchmarking an so on) are going to be different depending on whether or not Linux measures disk usage the correct way, or acts like Windows and says 1000 == 1024
, as far as hard drive capacities are reported.
Ans just so I don't get accused of splitting hairs, the difference between a terabyte and a tebibyte is ~10%, which means that difference in one direction is the difference between getting 90% of our data backed up and having all of it backed up, while the difference in the other direction is six figures in cost, and frankly, if the company's going to waste that kind of money, it really should be on buying me an Aston Martin.
The Avamar-trained and certified engineer who's "helping" to set this up doesn't know, their sales reps don't know, and their tech support doesn't know either, so I figured I'd ask here, in the hopes that one of our resident Linux gurus knows right off (or can instruct me on how to find out), so I don't waste anymore time talking to storage "experts" who don't know what a kibibyte is. ("No, I'm NOT pronouncing it wrong, and please transfer me to someone who knows anything.")
Incidentally, if the answer is version or distro-dependent, let me know and I can SSH into the system to get that information.