utd-control-panel/www/sup/search/003.txt

What do KiB/MiB/GiB mean?


 KiB, MiB and
 GiB are all standard international units of
 storage. Most users will be familiar with 'Kilobytes' (KB), 'Megabytes' (MB), 
 etc; however, there is a lot of confusion about what values these represent.
 The SI prefixes for 'K' (actually 'k'), 'M' and 'G' are all multiples of 10 — 
 1000, 1000000 and 1000000000, respectively. When measuring computing storing
 capacity, however, it is often more useful to count in base 2. So the prefixes
 are often (incorrectly) associated with powers of 2 that have a similar value:
 A Kilobyte becomes 1024 Bytes, a Megabyte becomes 1024x a Kilobyte, etc.


 To combat this confusion, the International Electrotechnical Commission issued
 a new standard — K, M and G prefixes should be used in accordance with the SI
 units, Ki, Mi and Gi should be used for 'binary' prefixes. A comparison of
 these units is given below:


 
  PrefixSI unitSize (Bytes)IEC binary unitSize (Bytes)
 
 KiloKB1000KiB1024
 MegaMB1000000MiB1048576
 GigaGB1000000000GiB1073741824


 All units used in the UTD-Hosting control panel use the IEC format. Units
 on the main UTD-Hosting site (including bandwidth/hard drive limits) use SI
 units, which is the standard for ISPs and storage manufacturers.