Comment 19 for bug 538165

The total capacity of an optical or magnetic disk isn't based on the size of its sectors. It's based on fitting the maximum number of bits in the surface area of a given circle. They aren't going to throw away storage space just to make it an even multiple of the nearest power of 2.

    sudo fdisk -l

    Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes

How is it beneficial to display this disk to the user as "149 GB", or 152,627 MB"? What advantage is there to this convention? How does this make things more intuitive or convenient for the user?

"160.0 GB" makes a lot more sense to me. Likewise "500 GB" for a 500107862016 bytes disk, and "8.0 GB" for 8040480256 bytes.