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

A byte is made up of 8 bits. The bits are either a 1 or a 0. Different configurations of 1’s and 0’s in a byte control the signals sent to different technologies or the information being stored in a device. Most signals sent and received in common technologies are configured into bytes because 8 bits is the minimum amount needed to code a single character.

When technologies are designed to be able to compute a certain amount of bits the amount of bytes will usually be a multiple of 8 such as 32, 64, 128, or 256.

Kilobytes, mega, giga, tera, and peta are all used to quantify the amount of bytes which can be done in the same way as prefixes work in the metric system with base 10. But since the technology is made to hold however many bits of information the amount of bytes is almost always a multiple of 8.

Long story short the numbers not being multiples of ten is because instead of making new prefixes for binary they used the same ones that were already in use for other common measurement systems eventhough they signify multiples of 10 for things that are multiples of 8 bits.