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eli5 why storage solutions( like USBs and SD cards) come in odd variations like 128gb, 256gb instead of just 100, 200, 300 etc. (lemmit.online)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The original was posted on /r/explainlikeimfive by /u/Responsible_Ad_3180 on 2023-08-10 21:00:42.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Computers deal with powers of 2. They read data as two states, either 1 or 0, calles binary. But you need to create chuncks of data. So 4 bits is a nibble and 8 bits is a byte. We mainly deal with bytes in storage computations.

So 2^2 = 4, 2^3=8, 2^4 =16.......2^8 = 256, 2^10= 1024.

So if we represent that using metric system of base 10 decimal. People tend to say 1KiloByte ( 1000 bytes), but a computer sees 1024bits due to the power of 2 groupings.

Man i suck at ELi5, hope that made any sense.