Data Storage Converter

Because the manufacturer sold 10¹² bytes and the operating system is displaying 2⁴⁰ bytes per unit while calling it GB. The drive holds exactly what was advertised; the two are counting differently.

A gigabyte is 10⁹ bytes; a gibibyte is 2³⁰, which is 1,073,741,824. The binary prefixes — kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi — exist specifically to remove this ambiguity.

Computers address memory in powers of two, so binary multiples were natural. Storage was sold in decimal because it produces larger numbers. Both persist, and the standards body created the binary prefixes to separate them.

Eight, essentially universally now. Network speeds are quoted in bits per second and file sizes in bytes, which is why a 100 Mbps connection downloads at about 12.5 MB/s.

Because memory addressing is inherently binary — a 32-bit address bus reaches exactly 2³² locations. That is why RAM comes in 8, 16 and 32 GB rather than 10 or 20.

Petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte, each a thousand times the last in decimal. The binary equivalents are pebi, exbi, zebi and yobi.

A convention from telecommunications, where signalling is inherently bit-based. It also produces larger numbers, which has not hurt its persistence in marketing.

A photograph a few megabytes, an hour of music around 60, an hour of high-definition video several gigabytes. Video dominates storage in essentially every consumer context.

Four bits, half a byte — one hexadecimal digit. It is a genuine term and it appears mostly in low-level programming.

Roughly 1 GB an hour for standard definition and several times that for high definition or 4K. It is the reason data caps and streaming quality settings exist together.

How much smaller a file becomes. Lossless compression typically manages two or three to one on text; lossy formats achieve far more by discarding information selectively.

The same decimal-versus-binary counting as hard drives, plus over-provisioning — spare blocks reserved for wear levelling that are not available to the user.