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- What do KiB/MiB/GiB mean?
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- PrefixSI unitSize (Bytes)IEC binary unitSize (Bytes)
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- KiloKB1000KiB1024
- MegaMB1000000MiB1048576
- GigaGB1000000000GiB1073741824
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- 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.
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