BrowserTools

Data Size Converter

Bytes, KB, MB, GB, TB and bits

By Guga — BrowserTools maintainer, Tbilisi, Georgia Updated 2026-08-17
Free Private No uploads
What is Data Size Converter?

Digital sizes come in two incompatible families and mixing them is the source of most of the confusion in this category. The decimal set multiplies by a thousand: a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte a million, a gigabyte a billion. The binary set multiplies by 1024 and uses the KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB names precisely to keep the two apart. Both families are in this converter side by side, along with the bit and the byte, so the gap becomes arithmetic rather than folklore: one gibibyte is 1.073741824 gigabytes, and a terabyte drive holding 1024 gibibytes appears to its operating system as roughly 931 GB. Values carry up to eight decimal places, switching to scientific notation only at the extremes, and the complete set appears in one grid as you type.

Convert digital storage between bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and their binary (KiB/MiB) counterparts — with a clear decimal/binary distinction.

Private Data Size Converter In Your Browser

Data Size Converter is processed locally with client-side JavaScript. Your files never touch a server, and there is no queue to wait in.

Step-by-Step

How to use Data Size Converter

1

Put the number of bits, bytes or larger units into Value.

2

Pick its current unit from From unit — KB, MB, GB and TB are decimal; KiB, MiB, GiB and TiB are binary.

3

Point To unit at the unit you want, or press swap if the two are the wrong way round.

4

Read the result, or tap a tile in the All data size units grid to bring a different unit into the Result line.

Key Capabilities
  • Ten units spanning bit, byte, and both the decimal and binary scales
  • Decimal and binary prefixes kept as separate, correctly labelled entries
  • Live readout of the entered size in all ten units at once
  • An on-page explanation of the 1 TB / 931 GB discrepancy
Common Use Cases
  • A sysadmin reconciling a vendor's '1 TB' drive specification with the 931 GiB free space the server reports.
  • A developer reading a 250 MB model download in a README and checking it against a 512 MB upload cap.
  • A student explaining to a class why a 500 GB disk shows as 465 GB once formatted.
Clear Answers

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does a 1 TB drive show up as 931 GB?
Because the drive is 10^12 bytes and the operating system counts in powers of 1024. 1000 GB is 10^12 bytes, which divides by 1024 three times to give 931.32 GiB, and anything that is not a round number in binary is rounded for display. Nothing is missing from the disk; two different definitions of a prefix are being used.
Is a megabyte 1000 bytes or 1024?
Both, depending on who is talking. Here MB means 10^6 bytes and MiB means 1024^2 bytes, which is the convention the International Electrotechnical Commission set out to stop the ambiguity. Drive manufacturers use the decimal units; most software reports the binary ones.
How many bits are in a byte?
Eight, so the bit is included as the first unit in the list. This is the one conversion in the table that is exact and unavoidable: a 100-megabit-per-second connection moves 12.5 megabytes per second, assuming no protocol overhead.
Why is there no petabyte or exabyte unit?
The table stops at the terabyte and tebibyte, which covers individual drives and most datasets. Larger figures are easy to reach by hand — a petabyte is a million terabytes — and adding units beyond what anyone measures individually adds little.