Why does digital storage always have the same values eg. 32gb, 64gb, 128gb, 256gb etc. and why do they double every time they go up in size? Is this a limitation or just a standard?
In: Technology
As you probably know digital computers and storage are implemented using binary logic circuitry and this makes it convenient to work with numbers that are powers of two. In the case of storage, adding 1 bit to the range of your addressable storage also doubles the storage size. It is probably also convenient for the circuit layout to simply widen or mirror in a symmetric way (two paths instead of one, two blocks instead of one) existing structures rather than create new ad-hoc structures to deal with odd amounts of storage…
EDIT: I completely missed that this is an ELI5. Ignore.
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