B-Tree for on-disk storage

Disk seeks are expensive. B-Tree structure is designed specifically to avoid disk seeks as much as possible. Therefore B-Tree packs much more keys/pointers into a single node than a binary tree. This property makes the tree very flat. Usually most B-Trees are only 3 or 4 levels deep and the root node can be easily cached. This requires only 2-3 seeks to find anything in the tree. Leaves are also "packed" this way, so iterating a tree (e.g. full scan or range scan) is very efficient, because you read hundreds/thousands data-rows per single block (seek).

In binary tree of the same capacity, you'd have several tens of levels and sequential visiting every single value would require at least one seek.