Digital Tools

Digital Storage Converter

Digital Storage measures the capacity of electronic data holding devices. Unlike most physical measurements, digital data suffers from a naming conflict between two systems: the Decimal (Base 10) system used by hardware manufacturers and the Binary (Base 2) system used by operating systems.

This professional converter clarifies this distinction. It converts between standard Bits/Bytes, the decimal units found on packaging (KB, MB, TB), and the binary units used by computers (KiB, MiB, TiB).

Decimal (SI) & Base

1k = 1000

Binary (IEC)

1k = 1024

Why is my drive smaller?

Manufacturers sell “1 TB” as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (Decimal).
Windows reads this in Binary (1024³), resulting in 931 GiB.

Decimal vs. Binary Prefixes

Storage capacity is defined in two ways:

  • SI (Decimal): Base 10. Prefixes like Kilo (1000) and Mega (1,000,000). Used by hard drive manufacturers, network speeds (Mbps), and macOS.
  • IEC (Binary): Base 2. Prefixes like Kibi (1024) and Mebi (1,048,576). Used by Windows, RAM modules, and file sizes in many operating systems.

References

How to Use This Converter

Instantly see the difference between “1 TB” and “1 TiB”.

1

Input Size

Type the value into the known field (e.g., enter “1” in TB – Terabyte).

2

Compare Systems

Look at the right-hand column to see the binary equivalent (e.g., TiB – Tebibyte) often displayed by computers.

3

Copy Result

Click the button to copy the precise value to your clipboard.