Base 2 is binary notation working in powers of 2 and base 10 is what we use normally counting from one to ten. You can see the difference when look at the hard drive space in your operating system. An 80 GB hard drive will show up as roughly 74GB. The 6GB wasn't used or reserved; hard drive manufacturers market their hard drives in base 10 so 1000 bytes equals 1 kilobyte, but computers work in binary (base 2) so to computers 1024 bytes equals 1 kilobyte.

Base 2 is binary notation working in powers of 2 and base 10 is what we use normally counting from one to ten. You can see the difference when look at the hard drive space in your operating system. An 80 GB hard drive will show up as roughly 74GB. The 6GB wasn't used or reserved; hard drive manufacturers market their hard drives in base 10 so 1000 bytes equals 1 kilobyte, but computers work in binary (base 2) so to computers 1024 bytes equals 1 kilobyte.