Data Storage Unit Converter

Storage manufacturers traditionally advertise capacity using decimal (1000-based) units, while operating systems and RAM have historically reported binary (1024-based) sizes — this mismatch is exactly why a "1TB" drive shows up as roughly 931 GB in your OS, a frequent source of confusion.

They stand for "binary" (kibi-, mebi-, gibi-) — an IEC standard introduced specifically to disambiguate 1024-based units from their 1000-based decimal counterparts (KB, MB, GB), since both were historically just called "kilobyte," "megabyte," etc.

Most modern operating systems and file managers (including macOS and recent versions of Windows in some contexts) now report file sizes using decimal (1000-based) units to match how storage is marketed, though this still varies by OS and application — check which convention your specific tool uses if precision matters.

Yes — every unit updates live as you type your source value or switch between decimal and binary modes, so you can immediately see how a value looks across every unit at once.