>>26 There are two different systems of measurement for numbers.
One is in base ten. That's regular numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. So, a kilobyte is 1 000 bytes. A megabyte is 1 000 000 bytes. Pretty straightforward.
One is in base 2. This is what a computer actually uses, since it processes data in binary form rather than decimal form. Thus, it'd be 0, 1, 10, 11, 101..., instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. For base 2, one kilo is 1024, since you can't actually make 1000 in base 2. So, one megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, which is not 1 024 000 bytes. Every time you get bigger, the different gets larger. So, at that point, there are 1024MB in one GB, and 1024KB in one MB, and 1024B in one KB. So, you end up with 1GB = 1,073,741,824B and not 1,000,000,000B.
On packaging, the advertisers will say their hard drive has 1 TB of storage. But, in reality, it does not. It has 1,000,000,000,000B, which is not 1TB of usable data. It's actually 931 GB. They use the decimal system because it boasts the space more and more people never really notice. In reality, they have less than they advertise.
