Decimal / Metric Units (Base 103)
Binary / IEC Units (Base 210)

Decimal (base 10) vs Binary (base 2) Units

Historically, units like KB/MB/GB were used to refer to both base-10 and base-2 measurements. To remove ambiguity, standard organizations (IEC, IEEE) introduced binary prefixes:

Decimal: 1 Megabyte (MB) = 1,000,000 Bytes = 1,000 Kilobytes (KB)
Binary: 1 Mebibyte (MiB) = 1,048,576 Bytes = 1,024 Kibibytes (KiB)

Operating systems like Windows compute storage capacity in base-2 (Binary) but label it as MB/GB, while storage manufacturers and network engineers size metrics strictly in base-10 (Decimal). This converter bridges that gap.

Copied!