About

One of the most persistent sources of confusion in IT hardware is the discrepancy between advertised storage space and the actual usable space reported by operating systems. A "1 Terabyte" drive often appears as only "931 Gigabytes" on a computer. This is not an error but a difference in counting systems: Manufacturers use Decimal (Base 10), while most systems use Binary (Base 2).

This tool bridges that gap. It allows IT professionals, system administrators, and hardware consumers to convert any data unit-from a single Bit to a Yottabyte-directly into Gigabytes. The "System Toggle" feature calculates the exact value for both standards, ensuring you know exactly how much capacity you have for backups, server partitioning, or cloud storage allocation.

Formulas

The conversion logic depends on the selected base system. For Decimal (SI Standard):

V_GB = V_bytes1,000,000,000

For Binary (IEC Standard, often displayed as GB in Windows):

V_GiB = V_bytes1,073,741,824

Reference Data

Unit	Symbol	Decimal Value (Base 10)	Binary Value (Base 2)
Kilobyte	KB / KiB	10³ Bytes	2¹⁰ Bytes
Megabyte	MB / MiB	10⁶ Bytes	2²⁰ Bytes
Gigabyte	GB / GiB	10⁹ Bytes	2³⁰ Bytes
Terabyte	TB / TiB	10¹² Bytes	2⁴⁰ Bytes
Petabyte	PB / PiB	10¹⁵ Bytes	2⁵⁰ Bytes
Exabyte	EB / EiB	10¹⁸ Bytes	2⁶⁰ Bytes

Frequently Asked Questions

Hard drive manufacturers define 1 TB as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. However, Windows defines 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes (Binary). Dividing 1 trillion by this binary number results in approximately 931 GB.

GB (Gigabyte) strictly means 10^9 bytes. GiB (Gibibyte) means 2^30 bytes. While technically distinct, the term "GB" is often used colloquially to refer to GiB in software contexts.

Yes. The tool automatically handles the 8:1 ratio between bits and bytes before scaling to Gigabytes.