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Convert data storage between bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes in both decimal and binary systems.
All Conversions (decimal)
Data Storage Systems:
Decimal (SI): 1 KB = 1,000 B, 1 MB = 1,000 KB
Binary (IEC): 1 KiB = 1,024 B, 1 MiB = 1,024 KiB
Hard drive manufacturers use decimal, while operating systems traditionally use binary. This causes the apparent size discrepancy.
Drive manufacturers use decimal (1 GB = 1 billion bytes), but operating systems like Windows use binary (1 GB = 2^30 = 1.073 billion bytes). A 1 TB drive shows as ~931 GiB in Windows.
KB (kilobyte) = 1,000 bytes in the SI decimal system. KiB (kibibyte) = 1,024 bytes in the IEC binary system. The IEC prefixes (Ki, Mi, Gi) were introduced to remove ambiguity.
macOS switched to decimal (GB = 10^9) in OS X 10.6. Windows uses binary (GiB) but labels it 'GB'. Linux varies by application.
In decimal: 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. In binary: 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30).
1 petabyte (decimal) = 1,000 terabytes = 10^15 bytes. Large data centers and cloud providers store exabytes (1,000 PB) of data.