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I'll preface by saying I am not a computer specialist. My question is posted as a point of curiosity.

Scouring the web for answers, I have seen posted that hexadecimal could be used to store numerical information on hard drives. I have even asked on this site and received very well written and logical answers. But there are many sites where there are those that allege that hexadecimal can be used to store numerical information on a hard drive. Note: store, not display.

The prevailing logic in these cases is since hex digits are half bytes, or nibbles, they only occupy have the size of regular numerical value from a character set.

For every 100 bytes used to represent a number a 100 digits long, built from a character set, only 42 bytes may be used to store the same number sequence as hex digits. The equation: [100 log 10/log 16] is utilized to support this notion.

Yet, others have alleged that the actual storage of information in hexadecimal on a hard drive is not that efficient because the hex digits (A-F) would be stored as full characters requiring 8-bits, or 1 byte. For example, to store 1A34B7 would actually require at least two hex digits to represented with full bytes on the hard drive instead of half bytes for the numerical portions. It can display the value in half-bytes, but once storage comes into play, the character hex digits must use full bytes.

What is the reality of this scenario?

Thank you.

J. J.
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I think your confusing a few topics.

If you had to store the number 100 on a computer, it would be stored in binary, hex 0x64, which would occupy a single byte. There are some caveats to that of course. Like it is perfectly fine to store the number 100 on a disk as a three byte value, but that would typically only happen when a computer is treating some stream of text as text.

In terms of the actual storage medium, In many cases, if the medium allows more than one bit of data to be stored, the manufacturer will attempt to to utilize that. For instance improving storage through shingled storage (for disks), or TLC (for SSD). Whatever the underlying method is however, the end result is that the manufacturer will provide a storage number in bytes.

Clarus
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