My argument has been: Can I store just ONE byte at a time? Can I expand by singular bytes in a normal system? For hard drives, and even flash memory, the phy

My argument has been: Can I store just ONE byte at a time? Can I expand by singular bytes in a normal system? For hard drives, and even flash memory, the physical size of a sector converged, rather naturally, to a multiple of system word size, and since that had also converged to a power of 2, to a larger power of 2. Thus hard drives have sectors that were 512 bytes (4096 or '4Kbits'), and also why the smallest write available for modern drives is a multiple of 2. Binary is the native nomenclature of computers. It only makes sense that related equipment should also use the native (binary) engineering unit approximations as a result. Though for communications equipment, they do have variable sized packets, which even though computers generate 8 bit 'octet' based signals might technically be used by some other format that doesn't; and talking about the actual speed on the wire conveying that in maximum possible raw bit states is a tiny bit confusing when the rest are binary units, but it's less strongly wrong than a system where the lowest addressable (real) unit is binary based.