The ill-thought of SI idea of what a Kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, Tera-, and Peta- should be follows: Storage data units (SI) Unit
#Convert gb to mb software free#
As with any centrally planned attempt to override what a free market system has arrived it, the SI convention is still fighting to get widespread traction, despite its adoption by the aforementioned organization.
#Convert gb to mb software iso#
Despite acceptance of these conventions by the IEEE, EU, ISO and NIST, there is still great confusion when talking about the metrics, both in common folk and among computer science professionals such as developers, etc. In an attempt to resolve the confusion in 1998 the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) proposed new names for the 1024 KiloByte and the 1024 2 MegaByte: KibiByte and MebiByte (KiB, MiB), and accordingly for higher order metrics. In many cases people get it wrong, as they fail to recognize the existence of two competing definitions for these metrics.
The SI declared that a KiloByte is 1000 Bytes and codified that into the International System of Quantities, which, naturally, caused a great confusion since there was already a unit called KiloByte and it equaled 1024 Bytes! You can easily find a ton of topics and discissions online with people asking how many bytes or kilobytes are there in a megabyte, or how many megabytes in a gigabyte, how many gigabytes in a terabyte, and so on and so forth. However, this wasn't to the liking of people in the standardization institutions. This is how every student of computer science picks up the units alongside binary math and all the rest of basic CS. prefixes which were already in use for measuring lengths and weights, despite the inaccuracy. That's exactly 1,024, not 1,025 and certainly not 1,000 and since 1,024 was close to 1,000, computer scientists decided to adopt the kilo-, mega-, etc. If you have 10 address pins on a memory chip you get a total of 2 10 addresses on that chip. It comes from how computer memory is built and addressed (yes, we are talking electrical circuit level stuff) and on that level it only makes sense that memory is built in such a way that its size (number of addressable units) scales with powers of two. So: Storage capacity data units (binary) Unitīut why multiples of 1024, you might ask? It's because in a binary system every unit, no matter how big, is a power of 2, and 1024 is 2 10, unlike a decimal system where it is a power of 10. In the standard binary system, you have KiloByte, MegaByte, GigaByte, TeraByte, PetaByte and so on, all being derived as the smaller unit multiplied by 1024. Initially there were other systems with 10-bit Bytes, but these are not really in use today. The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch early computer. From it, all other data units are derived, according to two competing systems, the commonly used binary system and the standard, but not so commonly used system of the SI (International System of Units) - more on this in point 3 below.Īll data storage units are derived from the bit, with the fundamental unit for data storage being the 8-bit Byte (1 Byte = 8 bits). A bit is the smallest amount of information you can write to a storage device, it is either 1 or 0 on all binary systems, which is most of the systems we have to date. Storage of digital data on any kind of device: the now forgotten floppy disks, almost forgotten CD-ROMs, DVDs, as well as hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), thumb drives (USB sticks) is measured in a fundamental unit: the bit. Storage capacity & memory capacity data unitsĪ lot of people use this data unit converter to calculate storage capacity or memory capacity. Mixed and unorthodox conversions are supported as well, such as MB/s to mbps and mbps to megabytes per second. This tool supports pure data conversions such as from MB to GB, GB to MB, GB to TB, TB to GB, MB to KB, etc., as well as bandwidth conversions: mbps to kbps, mbps to gbps.