Understanding the difference between GB/TB and GiB/TiB

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