Softonic

File Size Converter

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Type a value in any unit, bytes, KB, MB, GB, TB or their IEC binary siblings (KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB), and get its equivalent in the unit you need in one step. Convert freely between decimal (SI, powers of 1000) and binary (IEC, powers of 1024) units, so the 1000 vs 1024 ambiguity never makes you quote the wrong figure in a vendor spec or cloud-quota calculation.

How to convert a file size

  1. 1

    Enter a value

    Enter a number and choose its unit, for example 500 with MB, 1.5 with GiB or 750 with KB.

  2. 2

    Choose the units

    Pick any combination of decimal (SI: KB/MB/GB) and binary (IEC: KiB/MiB/GiB) units; you can mix both conventions in one conversion.

  3. 3

    Read the result

    Read the converted value in the unit that fits your audience or report.

  4. 4

    Switch direction

    Flip the input and output units with one click.

Unit reference

Decimal (SI) Bytes Binary (IEC) Bytes
1 KB 1,000 1 KiB 1,024
1 MB 1,000,000 1 MiB 1,048,576
1 GB 1,000,000,000 1 GiB 1,073,741,824
1 TB 10^12 1 TiB 2^40 ≈ 1.0995 * 10^12
1 PB 10^15 1 PiB 2^50

Which one do you use where?

Context Convention
Hard drive / SSD capacity Decimal, vendors print 1 TB = 10^12 bytes
Network speeds (Mbps) Decimal, 1 Mbps = 10^6 bits/sec
RAM Binary, 16 GB RAM = 16 GiB
Operating system reports Often binary (Linux -h, macOS before 10.6)
Windows size reports Binary with “GB” label (confusing but common)
AWS / cloud quotas Decimal (GB, TB)
iOS / iCloud storage Decimal

The iOS question

When Apple says your iPhone has “256 GB”, they mean 256,000,000,000 bytes. The OS reports available space in the same decimal convention, which is why an iPhone storage bar lines up with the marketing number.

Common mistakes

  • Reading a disk-full dialog as binary. Windows Explorer says “1.00 GB” but uses binary, so the real decimal size is 1.074 GB, sometimes enough to confuse a quota check.
  • Forgetting the prefix i. KiB and KB differ by 2.4%. At terabyte scale the drift becomes ~10%.
  • Mixing units in a single spec. “Up to 500 Mbps / 50 GB cap”, the first is bits, the second is bytes; divide by 8 before comparing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Historically, engineers rounded 1,024 to “1K” because powers of 2 matter in hardware. When the unit got applied to disks, vendors switched to decimal 1,000 because it gives them a bigger headline number. IEC formalized the split in 1998 with the KiB/MiB names, but the old “KB = 1024” usage never fully died.

1 GB (decimal, 10^9 bytes) is about 953.67 MiB, because 10^9 / 2^20 = 953.67… . Most people round to “1 GB ≈ 1000 MiB” for quick mental maths, which is accurate to half a percent.

Pick one and be explicit. If you are writing for a hardware or storage audience, decimal (GB) is standard. If you are writing for sysadmins or developers, binary (GiB) is clearer. Mixing without labels causes the most confusion.

1 PB (decimal) is 10^15 bytes, or roughly 1,000 TB / 1,000,000 GB. A single PB fits about 500 hours of 4K HDR video or around 200 million large phone photos.

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