The binary effect
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The binary effect is the unofficial technical term referring to the discrepancy between different reported sizes for computer hard drives and other storage media. This happens because drive manufacturers measure a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) bytes, while a computer measures a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes. For example, the Western Digital 500 GB SE16 has an exact size of 500,105,216,000 bytes. Although this is 500 gigabytes, in binary gigabytes this is only 465 gigabytes. This does not apply to CD-ROM media. It does, however, apply to DVD-ROM media. It also applies to hard drives, Zip disks, floppy disks, and nearly all types of flash memory.
