Data Storage Converter

File size units are one of those things that trip people up constantly: is a gigabyte 1,000 megabytes or 1,024? For this tool — and for operating systems, RAM specifications, and most technical contexts — the answer is 1,024, the base-2 (binary) standard. So 1 KB = 1,024 bytes, 1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes, and so on up to petabytes. Paste in any value in any unit and every other unit appears immediately.

Cloud storage shoppers comparing plans in terabytes with file sizes in megabytes use it to figure out how many photos actually fit. Sysadmins converting server disk quotas between gigabytes and terabytes, developers sizing database limits expressed in bytes, and students answering "how many gigabytes in a terabyte?" on a homework problem all hit the same need: see the value in every unit without doing the math by hand.

The converter shows the full ladder from bytes to petabytes in a single view — type 1.5 GB and instantly see it rendered as 1,610,612,736 bytes, 1,572,864 KB, 1,536 MB, 0.00146 TB, and 0.00000143 PB, formatted to a sensible number of significant digits.

This tool converts using binary multiples: a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte 1,024 squared, and so on up the scale. That is the convention most operating systems use when reporting file and disk sizes, so the figures here match what your file manager shows.

It is also, strictly, the wrong use of the prefixes. In SI, kilo means exactly 1,000, and the IEC introduced separate binary prefixes — kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte — for the powers of 1,024. Those names never caught on in general use, so the decimal prefixes are widely used with binary values, which is the ambiguity underneath a great deal of confusion.

The discrepancy compounds as the scale rises: about 2.4% at kilobytes, but roughly 10% by terabytes.

Storage manufacturers use decimal multiples, because that is what the prefixes mean and because it yields a larger number. Windows and most Linux tools report in binary multiples while labelling them with decimal prefixes, which is where the apparent shortfall on a new drive comes from — a recurring source of complaints and at least one class action. Recent macOS reports decimal, so the same drive reads differently across operating systems.

Networking follows a third convention. Bandwidth is quoted in bits per second, not bytes, and uses true decimal multiples — so a 100 Mbps connection delivers at most about 12.5 megabytes per second before overhead. Confusing the bit and the byte is an eightfold error and by far the most common mistake in this area.

Where precision matters, state the unit you mean. Writing MiB when you mean 1,024-based removes the ambiguity entirely, even if the term still looks unfamiliar to most readers.