Data Storage Converter

Digital storage is measured two different ways, and the two rarely agree. Decimal units (kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte) follow the metric convention of powers of 1,000, while binary units (kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte) follow powers of 1,024, matching how memory is actually addressed in binary. A gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes; a gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes — close enough to confuse, different enough to matter.

This distinction is exactly why a new hard drive advertised as '1 TB' shows up as roughly 931 GB in your operating system: the manufacturer used the decimal definition, while the OS display used the binary calculation but kept the decimal-sounding label.

The tool is also useful for translating between bits and bytes, which matters when comparing an internet plan's advertised speed (usually in megabits per second, Mbps) against a file size (usually in megabytes, MB) — dividing by 8 to go from bits to bytes is a step people often forget, which makes download-time estimates come out roughly 8 times too optimistic.