Resource units in GB or GiB?

#1

Hi there!

The Hard Disk and SSD industry usually markets product capacity in GB (big ol’ gigabytes) as opposed to GiB, which ends with many users confused about “why their recently purchased disk has less capacity than advertised” once they see the size in GiB in their OS.

The Threefold wiki Resource Units page explains storage and memory Resource Units are calculated in GB, too. However, in the v2 Explorer, my nodes seem to show the SRU calculated in GiB (my 480 GB was showing 447, its size in GiB):

imagen

After migrating my nodes to v3, the SRU seems to be displayed in GB, and my 480 GB properly displays 480 GB. However, the MRU also seems to be converted from GiB to GB, and the same node as above now shows 202 GB instead of 188 GB (it actually has 192 GB):

imagen

I would therefore like to ask the following: are storage and memory Resource Units calculated in GB or in GiB for rewards? Depending on this, farmers like me may need to consider adding a bit more SRUs to optimize their CUs.

Thanks and happy farming!

#2

Great question. Indeed, the wiki makes no mention of GiB and this is a larger concern with the new SSD for CU requirement.

Perhaps @kristof can comment on this one.

#3

After investigating some cases brought up by confused farmers, I’ve confirmed the following: Minting is based on GiB, but v3 explorer reports small GB. The simulator makes no conversion, taking input labeled as “GB”.

The trickiest part about all of this is that GB is often used interchangeably where GiB is meant (even officially defined this way by some standards in the past!). So technically the simulator is not incorrect, although it’s using a discouraged convention.

I see a few ways to proceed…

  1. Change labeling in all wikis, explorers, and the simulator to specify GiB
  2. Retain GB labeling but update the quantities where applicable and also have the simulator convert to GiB behind the scenes
  3. Begin minting based on GB instead of GiB

The simplest thing, I think, is #3. Farmers will earn some extra tokens, which they were probably expecting anyway, and we’ll avoid tons of confusion going forward. I mean the kind of confusion that ended up in several hard drive manufacturers getting sued over this :scream:

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