Data Storage Converter

Data Storage Conversion — Complete Guide

Understanding data storage units is crucial for developers, system administrators, and anyone working with digital files. The confusion between decimal (KB, MB, GB) and binary (KiB, MiB, GiB) units is a perennial source of frustration — your "500 GB" hard drive shows as 465 GiB in your operating system because manufacturers use decimal units while operating systems use binary units.

Our Data Storage Converter supports both decimal (SI) and binary (IEC) units, helping you accurately convert between all commonly used data storage measurements. This is invaluable for capacity planning, understanding storage specifications, calculating bandwidth requirements, and debugging file size discrepancies.

Decimal vs Binary Units

• Decimal (SI): 1 KB = 1,000 bytes, 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes — used by storage manufacturers and network speeds.
• Binary (IEC): 1 KiB = 1,024 bytes, 1 MiB = 1,048,576 bytes — used by operating systems and RAM manufacturers.

Quick Reference

• 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000 KB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
• 1 GiB = 1,024 MiB = 1,048,576 KiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
• 1 TB = 1,000 GB ≈ 931.32 GiB