Understanding the difference between GB/TB and GiB/TiB

Modified on Mon, 25 Sep, 2023 at 5:00 PM

Overview

my2cloud monitors and bills in GiB/TiB for all storage-based metrics, this ensures clients are billed in the most economical way for their services.


What's the difference?

When purchasing disk drives, 1 GB is often defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, when viewed by an operating system, the capacity displayed is often less than this. For example, a new 1 TB hard drive would be reported by the OS as 931 GB (this is 931 GiB). GiB (Gibibytes) is a standard unit used in the field of data processing and transmission and is defined as base 1024 rather than base 1000.


In 1999 the IEC published a new international standard to display binary / base-2 values (KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, etc.) that can be used in place of the original SI base-10 format (KB, MB, GB, TB, etc.).


For example, 1 GB is defined as 1000³ bytes, whereas 1 GiB is defined as 1024³ bytes.

Unit of measure               Bytes

Kilobyte (KB)      1000¹ = 1,000

Megabyte (MB) 1000² = 1,000,000

Gigabyte (GB)    1000³ = 1,000,000,000

Terabyte (TB)     1000⁴ = 1,000,000,000,000

Petabyte (PB)    1000⁵ = 1,000,000,000,000,000

Unit of measure               Bytes                 

Kibibyte (KiB)     1024¹ = 1,024

Mebibyte (MiB) 1024² = 1,048,576

Gibibyte (GiB)    1024³ = 1,073,741,824

Tebibyte (TiB)    1024⁴ = 1,099,511,627,776

Pebibyte (PiB)   1024⁵ = 1,125,899,906,842,624

 

How is this converted?

GB to GiB

  • Multiply by (1000³ / 1024³), equivalent to 0.931323
  • Divide by this value to go from GiB to GB

 

TB to TiB

  • Multiply by (1000⁴ / 1024⁴), equivalent to 0.909495
  • Divide by this value to go from TiB to TB

 

GiB to TiB

  • Divide by 1024
  • Multiply by 1024 to go from TiB to GiB

GiB to TB

  •  Convert into GB by dividing by 0.931323, then divide by 1000 to get into TB

 

Examples of conversions

  • 1 GB = 0.93 GiB
  • 1 TB = 0.91 TiB = 931 GiB
  • 1 TiB = 1.1 TB = 1100 GB

 

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