A 1 TB HD has a capacity of 1,000,202,272,768 bytes, but it shows up as 931.5 GB. This is thanks to the use of binary units (1 kB = 1024 bytes) than the decimal SI units (1k = 1000).
Binary prefixes have been defined — KiB, MiB, GiB and TiB — but they are still not in common use.
AFAIK, only memory and flash are still using binary units to indicate their capacity — a 1 GB SD card is really 1 GiB. All others, including bandwidth and throughput, are in SI units.
Software
Software is a big issue. You'll never know whether it uses 1,000 or 1,024 unless you can see the actual number of bytes.
On my part, I'll try to do the right thing from now on and use k- for SI prefixes and Ki- for binary prefixes.
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