On May 27, 8:43*am, George Orwell wrote:
I got a USB flash drive of 8 GB, and it has just a pinch
over 8 x 10^9 bytes. I know magnetic disk GB are so,
but since the flash is solid state, I would expect that
it goes in powers of 2: 1024^3.
So where is the missing 7% of storage?


Mostly dedicated to things like manufacturing redundancy, spare
sectors and wear leveling. Almost all external storage* has always
been rated in the "proper" decimal amounts, the flash drive folks took
advantage of that.

*CDs (but not DVDs or other optical media) and some floppy formats
(the infamous “1.44MB floppy,” for example) are exceptions.