Data Storage Converter
Convert digital storage units — bits, bytes, KB, MB, GB, TB and binary KiB/MiB/GiB.
1 MB = 0.001 GB
Popular Data Storage Conversions
- Bit to Gigabyte
- Byte to Gigabyte
- Kilobyte to Gigabyte
- Megabyte to Gigabyte
- Terabyte to Gigabyte
- Petabyte to Gigabyte
- Kibibyte to Gigabyte
- Mebibyte to Gigabyte
- Gibibyte to Gigabyte
- Tebibyte to Gigabyte
- Megabyte to Bit
- Megabyte to Byte
- Megabyte to Kilobyte
- Megabyte to Terabyte
- Megabyte to Petabyte
- Megabyte to Kibibyte
- Megabyte to Mebibyte
- Megabyte to Gibibyte
- Megabyte to Tebibyte
About data storage units
Digital storage is measured in bits and bytes: one byte equals eight bits, and a bit is the smallest possible unit of information — a 0 or a 1. Above the byte, two parallel naming systems coexist and routinely cause confusion. The decimal (SI) system uses prefixes meaning powers of 1,000: 1 kilobyte (KB) = 1,000 bytes, 1 megabyte (MB) = 1,000,000 bytes, 1 gigabyte (GB) = 10⁹ bytes. The binary system uses prefixes meaning powers of 1,024: 1 kibibyte (KiB) = 1,024 bytes, 1 mebibyte (MiB) = 1,048,576 bytes. Hard-drive manufacturers report capacity in decimal gigabytes; Windows historically reported in binary gibibytes — which is why a '1 TB' drive shows as roughly 931 GiB in Windows Explorer.
History & origin
The byte was established in the 1950s and 1960s as the natural chunk of data a computer processes together. The prefix 'kilo' was borrowed from the metric system but informally rounded from 1,000 to 1,024 because 2¹⁰ = 1,024 is close to 1,000 and convenient in binary arithmetic. By 1998 the ambiguity had become serious enough that the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) introduced the binary prefixes — kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi- — to eliminate confusion. Operating systems and software tools have been slowly adopting the IEC names since then.
Tips
The decimal-versus-binary gap widens rapidly at large scales. At the terabyte level, the difference is nearly 10%: 1 TB = 10¹² bytes, but 1 TiB = 2⁴⁰ bytes ≈ 1.0995 × 10¹² bytes. A drive sold as '2 TB' holds 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, which a binary-reporting OS displays as about 1.82 TiB. This explains why storage always 'disappears' after formatting — none of it has been lost, the units are just different.
Common questions
- Why does my 1 TB hard drive show less than 1 TB in Windows?
- Drive manufacturers define 1 TB as 10¹² bytes (decimal). Windows historically displays storage in binary units: 10¹² bytes ÷ 2³⁰ = approximately 931 GiB. Nothing is lost — the capacity is identical. The discrepancy is purely a labelling difference between decimal and binary gigabytes.
- What is the difference between KB and KiB?
- KB (kilobyte) = 1,000 bytes in the SI/decimal system. KiB (kibibyte) = 1,024 bytes in the IEC binary system. The same distinction applies up the chain: MB vs MiB, GB vs GiB, TB vs TiB. The gap starts small (2.4% at kilo) but grows to nearly 10% at tera and beyond.