this is true, i recently looked at how much it took to store data entrys (in b3d), and if it is numeric ie. an integer, it is stored as 8 bytes, 4 bytes for the value and 4 more bytes for i'm not sure what. so if you store binary as numeric data ie. values only 0-255 then this is 8 times more bytes than necessary.
strings are better, they have one null byte separating each of them so i decided the smallest realistic size of storing binary as internal data was as fake hex-byte strings ie. two string chars, this is 3 bytes instead of 8 then, but has to be converted which may slow things down a bit.
ideally, if you have a lot of binary data it would be best to store it all in separate file(s) as actual binary.
strings are better, they have one null byte separating each of them so i decided the smallest realistic size of storing binary as internal data was as fake hex-byte strings ie. two string chars, this is 3 bytes instead of 8 then, but has to be converted which may slow things down a bit.
ideally, if you have a lot of binary data it would be best to store it all in separate file(s) as actual binary.