If you really care to distinguish between powers of two and powers of ten, you should read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix. Using powers of two interchangeably with metric powers of ten was a given in the early days of computers (and is still used by many systems), but as time goes on and we begin to use larger and larger units, the error between the two continues to grow. You should be using kilo, mega, giga, etc. for powers of ten, and kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. for powers of two in order to be unambiguous. For example:
|------------|-----------|------------| | Bytes | SI Units | IEC Units | |------------|-----------|------------| | 1000 | 1.0 KB | 0.976 KiB | | 1024 | 1.024 KB | 1.0 KiB | | 1000000 | 1.0 MB | 0.9537 MiB | | 1048576 | 1.0486 MB | 1.0 MiB | | 1000000000 | 1.0 GB | 0.9313 GiB | | 1073741824 | 1.0737 GB | 1.0 GiB | |------------|-----------|------------|
See also: Converting bytes to megabytes.