🗄️ KB vs KiB

exact bytes · decimal & binary rows · the 7% gap · Mbps honesty

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Two families of prefixes describe the same bytes: the SI one (kilo = 1,000) that drive makers and network meters use, and the IEC binary one (kibi = 1,024) that operating systems traditionally used. The gap compounds by roughly 7% per step — 1 GB versus 1 GiB is already 7% — which is the entire reason a "2 TB" drive shows as 1.81 TiB. This page computes in BigInt so a petabyte lands exact, prints both readings, and ends with the bitrate trap: networking is measured in bits, storage in bytes, and the factor of 8 is where "my 100 Mbps download only writes 12 MB/s" goes to die.

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Who uses which family, and when it bites

Drives, SSDs, USB sticks and data plans sell in powers of 1,000; Windows reports in powers of 1,024 (and calls them KB/MB anyway — the pre-1998 habit), macOS switched to SI in 10.6, and every firmware or RAM spec still lives in binary. The mismatch is why a "500 GB" disk shows as 465 GiB in Windows — nobody cheated you, the units changed under the number. Memory channels, page sizes and filesystem block counts are binary because address lines come two at a time (2¹⁰ = 1,024 ≈ 1,000 was the original approximation). The IEC names — kibi, mebi, gibi — were ratified in 1998 precisely to end the ambiguity, and lost the culture war except in standards documents like this page.

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