Timeline of Binary Prefixes - 2010s

2010s

2010

• The ubuntu operating system uses the SI prefixes for base-10 numbers and IEC prefixes for base-2 numbers as of the 10.10 release.

2011

• The Gnu operating system uses the SI prefixes for base-10 numbers and IEC prefixes for base-2 numbers as of the parted-2.4 release (May 2011).

• "specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified. Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices with varying sector sizes. This change does not affect how parted handles suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc."
• "Note that as of parted-2.4, when you specify start and/or end values using IEC binary units like “MiB”, “GiB”, “TiB”, etc., parted treats those values as exact, and equivalent to the same number specified in bytes (i.e., with the “B” suffix), in that it provides no “helpful” range of sloppiness. Contrast that with a partition start request of “4GB”, which may actually resolve to some sector up to 500MB before or after that point. Thus, when creating a partition, you should prefer to specify units of bytes (“B”), sectors (“s”), or IEC binary units like “MiB”, but not “MB”, “GB”, etc."

2011

• On its Archive Project Request Form, the University of Oxford uses IEC prefixes: "The initial amount of data to be archived ( MiB GiB TiB )"