Data Storage Converter

Every rung of this ladder is a factor of 1024, not 1000. Your entry is reduced to a raw byte count using powers of two, then expanded back into six columns, so one gigabyte here means 1,073,741,824 bytes and one kilobyte means 1024. That is the binary convention that operating systems have always used, presented under the decimal SI names, and the mismatch is exactly why a drive advertised as one terabyte shows up as roughly 0.9095 on this page and as 931 gigabytes in a file manager: the manufacturer counted 10^12 bytes and the software divided by 1024 four times. The IEC's standard for information quantities, IEC 80000-13, formally coined kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte (KiB, MiB, GiB) as the unambiguous binary terms to end that argument, reserving kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte for the decimal, powers-of-1000 reading — and this converter takes the older side of it, labelling binary results with the decimal names.

Two details catch people out. Petabytes can be selected as an input unit but no petabyte column is printed, so very large entries come back in terabytes. And the Bits row multiplies bytes by eight, which matters because network and broadband speeds are quoted in bits per second while file sizes are quoted in bytes — the familiar factor-of-eight discrepancy between an advertised connection and an observed download rate. Nothing here models time, so it will not tell you how long a transfer takes, nor does it account for compression, filesystem overhead, or the difference between raw and formatted capacity.