Why Is My 32GB Flash Drive Actually 29.8 GB? " USB Flash Drives, along with hard drives and other types of computer storage, are measured in bytes. The problem is that the definition of a megabyte/gigabyte isn’t really the same between computers and storage manufactures. A computer says a kilobyte is 1024 bytes and a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. So one megabyte (one million bytes) is actually 1,048,576 bytes. To get to 32 gigabytes you have to multiply 1024 (bytes) x 1024 (kilobytes) x 1024 (megabytes) x 32 (gigabytes) which gives you 34,359,738,268 bytes of information. However, computer hard drive and storage makers had the clever idea that a gigabyte is defined as a “billion” bytes, so why do they need to give you extra bytes you didn’t pay for just because someone who made the PC decided 1024 bytes are in a kilobyte? So industry practice is to label things in even numbers, even though computers will see less space as measured in GB. You do get 32,000,000,000 bytes when yo...