Data Storage Converter

How to use Data Storage Converter

1. Enter the size or speed you have.
2. Select its unit — note whether you need the decimal (KB) or binary (KiB) family.
3. Read every other unit at once.
4. KB, MB, GB use powers of 1,000 here; KiB, MiB, GiB use powers of 1,024.
5. Lowercase b is bits, uppercase B is bytes — the difference is a factor of eight.
6. Network speeds (Kbps, Mbps, Gbps) are bits per second, so divide by eight for bytes per second.

1000 or 1024: the reason your drive looks smaller

A kilobyte is 1,000 bytes under the SI definition and 1,024 under the older computing convention. Drive manufacturers use 1,000; Windows reports using 1,024 while still writing “GB”. The gap compounds with each step — 2.4% at kilobytes, 7.4% at gigabytes, 10% at terabytes — so a 1 TB drive shows as about 931 GB in Windows and nothing is missing. macOS and Linux switched to the SI meaning years ago, which is why the same drive reports differently on different machines.

KiB, MiB and GiB are the unambiguous ones

IEC introduced the binary prefixes in 1998 precisely to end this: a kibibyte (KiB) is exactly 1,024 bytes, a mebibyte 1,048,576, a gibibyte 1,073,741,824. Both families are in this converter so you can move between them. Memory is genuinely binary — an 8 GB RAM module is 8 GiB, because addressing works in powers of two — while storage and file sizes are usually decimal. When precision matters, write KiB and MiB and the ambiguity disappears.

Bits and bytes: the factor of eight that halves your broadband

A byte is eight bits. Storage is quoted in bytes with a capital B; network speed is quoted in bits with a lowercase b. So a 100 Mbps connection transfers at most about 12.5 MB per second, and a 1 Gbps line gives roughly 125 MB/s — before protocol overhead, which takes another few percent. This is not a swindle, it is a genuine convention difference: networks have always counted bits because they transmit serially. It is also why a download that “should” take one second takes eight.

A sense of scale

A page of plain text is a few kilobytes. A high-quality photograph is 3–6 MB, a RAW file 25–50 MB. A minute of 1080p video is roughly 100 MB, of 4K roughly 400 MB. A dual-layer Blu-ray is 50 GB. A petabyte is a thousand terabytes — around 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets of text, or every photograph a large phone manufacturer’s cloud takes in a few hours.