If a gigabyte is 10^9 bytes, then why do common technologies use numbers like 32, 64, 128, 256 gigabytes instead of something like 100, 200, 500 to easily file into 10s?

Question

What is the purpose of these seemingly arbitrary multiples of 2

In: Technology

Answer 1

Because a gigabyte +isn’t+ 10^9 bytes, not exactly. Instead, it’s 2^30 bytes, or 1,043,741,824 (says my calculator) bytes.

Computers work on binary – it’s much easier to build switches with 2 positions, on and off, than it is to build ones with 10 positions. A kilobyte is actually 2^10 bytes, 1,024, and a megabyte is 2^20 , 1,048,576. So the sizes in between are also gonna use powers of 2, not powers of ten.

–Dave, they translate answers back into base 10 for our convenience, not for their own