Data Storage Converter

This binary-versus-decimal mismatch is also the reason a brand-new hard drive always shows less space than advertised the moment you plug it in. Manufacturers market capacity using the decimal system, where 1 TB means exactly 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, since it produces a cleaner, larger-looking number. Your operating system, meanwhile, reports that same drive using the binary system, where the same physical capacity works out to a smaller-looking number of "true" gigabytes. Nothing is actually missing, it's a difference in which math is being used to describe the same bytes.

This isn't just a technical curiosity either, it matters practically whenever you're estimating how much footage fits on a card, or whether a backup will actually fit on a drive with a given advertised capacity.

Pick your starting unit and enter a value, and the tool calculates the equivalent across every other standard unit simultaneously, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, even up to petabytes for larger enterprise or cloud contexts.

Worth knowing separately: storage and network speed use different base units entirely. Storage is measured in bytes, network bandwidth in bits, and there are eight bits in a byte, so a "100 Mbps" internet connection and a "100 MB" file are not measuring the same thing, a common point of confusion this tool doesn't try to collapse into one number.