Ever bought a “1TB” hard drive and had your computer report it as roughly 931 GB? That’s not a bug or a scam — it’s two competing, equally legitimate storage unit standards colliding. The Data Storage Unit Converter converts between both, side by side.
Two standards, same names
Storage manufacturers have traditionally used decimal (1000-based) units — 1 KB = 1,000 bytes, 1 MB = 1,000 KB, and so on — matching the metric system’s standard prefixes. Meanwhile, operating systems and RAM have historically used binary (1024-based) units for the same-sounding names, since computers naturally work in powers of 2.
Enter KiB, MiB, GiB
To fix the ambiguity, the IEC introduced binary-specific unit names: KiB (kibibyte), MiB (mebibyte), GiB (gibibyte), and so on — explicitly meaning 1024-based units, leaving KB/MB/GB free to mean decimal (1000-based) units unambiguously. Not every OS or app has adopted this naming convention consistently, which is part of why the confusion persists.
Which one should you use?
It depends on context — storage manufacturers market capacity in decimal, while your OS’s file browser might report file sizes in binary or decimal depending on the platform and version. This tool lets you toggle between both standards and see every unit level at once, so you can quickly cross-check whichever number you’re working from.
Try it yourself
Enter a value and instantly see it converted across bytes through petabytes, in both decimal and binary standards, on the Data Storage Unit Converter.