Byte Unit Converter
| Unit | Symbol | = base units |
|---|---|---|
| byte | B | 1 B |
| bit | bit | 0.125 B |
| kilobyte | KB | 1,000 B |
| megabyte | MB | 1,000,000 B |
| gigabyte | GB | 1,000,000,000 B |
| terabyte | TB | 1,000,000,000,000 B |
| petabyte | PB | 1,000,000,000,000,000 B |
| kibibyte | KiB | 1,024 B |
| mebibyte | MiB | 1,048,576 B |
| gibibyte | GiB | 1,073,741,824 B |
| nibble | nibble | 0.5 B |
| word (16-bit) | word | 2 B |
| sector (512 B) | sector | 512 B |
How to Use
Overview
A drive sold as 1 TB shows 931 GB in the operating system, not because it shrank but because decimal GB (1 GB = 1,000 MB) and binary GiB (1 GiB = 1,024 MiB) are mixed. This tool lists bytes, bits, KB to PB and KiB to GiB as two separate chains on one table, and keeps the nibble, the sixteen-bit word and the 512-byte sector for low-level work, so partition sizes, memory sticks and backup estimates can be checked against the same reference. Sector, word and nibble may be mixed in one batch because every line is normalised to bytes first, then converted out to whatever unit the target asks for. The mismatch has a paper trail: drive makers moved to SI prefixes in the late nineteen-nineties because a decimal terabyte is a smaller number of bytes than a binary one, and operating systems kept reporting in powers of two. IEC introduced KiB and GiB in 1998 to end the ambiguity, but consumer software still prints GB for 1,073,741,824 bytes. When a backup plan is sized, the difference compounds: a 4 TB array loses roughly 370 GB between the label and the file manager, which is close to one large media project. Partition alignment adds another case: a modern drive with four-kilobyte physical sectors needs offsets that are multiples of 4,096 bytes, so a table that only speaks in gigabytes hides the number that actually matters when a filesystem is created.
Features
- Thirteen units: byte, bit, KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, KiB, MiB, GiB, nibble, word, sector
- Decimal and binary chains side by side: 1 GB = 1,000 MB, 1 GiB = 1,024 MiB
- Bytes against bits: 1 B = 8 bit, for comparing bandwidth with capacity
- Nibble at 0.5 B, word at 2 B and sector at 512 B cover low-level arithmetic
- Expression input such as 1024*1024, with zero to eight decimals
- Batch conversion with TXT and CSV export for disk and capacity registers
How to use
- Enter a capacity figure or expression, for example 1024 or 500*1000
- Choose the source unit: GB for the retail label, GiB for the figure the system shows
- Leave the target empty for all results, or pin GiB to see the binary value
- Compare the GB and GiB rows to see exactly where the missing capacity went
- Paste several drive capacities and export CSV for a capacity register
Notes
- Thirteen storage units run from byte and bit through KB, MB, GB, TB and PB to KiB, MiB, GiB, nibble, word and sector, with the byte as the base and both counting systems kept apart.
- A decimal GB is 10⁹ bytes while a GiB is 2³⁰, a 7.4 percent gap, which is why vendors quote decimal and an operating system shows about 931 GiB for a 1 TB drive.
- The classic sector is 512 bytes against 4,096 on modern drives, so partition alignment must use multiples of 4 KiB and a gigabyte figure alone hides that.
- A bit and a byte differ by eight, with bandwidth in bit/s and file size in bytes, and turning one into a download time needs a duration this tool does not compute.
- Word and nibble serve low-level debugging; CSV exports carry no unit, so settle on GiB or GB before a batch total.
- A nibble is four bits, 0.5 B, used when discussing hexadecimal and BCD encodings
- This tool converts capacity only and does not estimate compression ratios, redundancy or file-system metadata overhead
- Petabyte results are long: lower the decimals to avoid misreading, the internal maths stays double precision