Data Unit Converter
Convert between bits, bytes and every decimal and binary multiple, so the difference between a GB and a GiB stops costing you an argument.
Result
Decimal prefixes (powers of 1000)
| Unit | Value |
|---|---|
| bit | 8,000,000,000,000 |
| byte | 1,000,000,000,000 |
| kbit | 8,000,000,000 |
| kB | 1,000,000,000 |
| Mbit | 8,000,000 |
| MB | 1,000,000 |
| Gbit | 8,000 |
| GB | 1,000 |
| Tbit | 8 |
| TB | 1 |
| Pbit | 0.008 |
| PB | 0.001 |
Binary prefixes (powers of 1024)
| Unit | Value |
|---|---|
| Kibit | 7,812,500,000 |
| KiB | 976,562,500 |
| Mibit | 7,629,394.53125 |
| MiB | 953,674.316406 |
| Gibit | 7,450.580597 |
| GiB | 931.322575 |
| Tibit | 7.275958 |
| TiB | 0.909495 |
About Data Unit Converter
Two prefix systems, one letter apart, differing by up to 10% at terabyte scale. This converts between all of them explicitly, so a capacity plan and a vendor datasheet can be compared without guessing which convention each used.
Converting a data cap into a sustained rate
Capacity questions usually arrive as a volume and need answering as a rate. One terabyte per 30-day month is 8 Tbit spread over 2.592 million seconds, about 3.09 Mbit/s sustained — which is why a 1 TB cap and a gigabit line are not in tension for typical use. Run the same arithmetic before sizing a backup window: 4 TB overnight in eight hours needs 1.1 Gbit/s of goodput, so a gigabit link cannot do it regardless of tuning.
Decimal or binary?
IEC binary prefixes - KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB - are powers of 1024. SI decimal prefixes - kB, MB, GB, TB - are powers of 1000. The gap compounds: 2.4% at kilo, 4.9% at mega, 7.4% at giga, 10% at tera. Networking uses decimal throughout, memory uses binary, and storage marketing uses decimal while Windows reports binary under decimal labels.
Common use cases
- Reconciling a disk vendor capacity with what the OS reports.
- Converting a monthly data cap into a sustained bit rate.
- Checking whether a monitoring graph is showing bits or bytes.
Edge cases and gotchas
- Lowercase b is bits, uppercase B is bytes - an 8x difference hiding in one character.
- Windows displays GiB but labels it GB; Linux and macOS are generally explicit.