Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Power of two" in English language version.
Disk file sizes are often expressed in kilobytes and megabytes. A file may be listed as taking 32 kilobytes, or 32K bytes. This does not mean exactly 32,000 bytes. A kilobyte is defined as 210, or 1024, bytes. So 32K bytes is actually equal to 32 × 1024, or 32768, bytes. A megabyte is correspondingly defined as 220, or 1,048,576, bytes. Therefore, 32 megabytes (32M bytes) equals 33554432 bytes.Sammes, Tony; Jenkinson, Brian (2007). "Understanding Information". Forensic Computing (2nd ed.). London: Springer. pp. 7–48. doi:10.1007/978-1-84628-732-9_2. ISBN 978-1-84628-397-0.
Today the byte is used as the basic measure of memory size, [...]. As computer memory and disk sizes have become very much larger, so the byte has become a comparatively small unit, and various powers of two are now used to qualify it: a kilobyte is 210 = 1024 bytes; a megabyte is 220 = 1048576 bytes; a gigabyte is 230 = 1073741824 bytes; a terabyte is 240 = 1099511627776 bytes; and a petabyte is 250 = 1125899906842624 bytes. This sequence of powers of 2 units continues further with exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte. Traditionally, computing scientists have always based their memory units on powers of 2 rather than on powers of 10, though this is a matter of some contention within the standards community. [Footnote: The issue is whether the prefixes kilo, mega, giga etc. should be raised to powers of two as traditionally implemented by the computing fraternity or to powers of ten as decreed by the General Conference of Weights and Measures for SI units. If they were to be changed to powers of ten, kilo would become 103 = 1000 and mega would become 106 = 1000000.]
