Bo's Requested Conversions

We get a lot of questions concerning bit/byte conversions and all of that sort of thing. In that light, we have put together this chart for your convenience.

• Although data storage capacity is generally expressed in binary code, many hard drive manufacturers (and some newer BIOSs) use a decimal system to express capacity.
  • For example, a 30 gigabyte drive is usually 30,000,000,000 bytes (decimal) not the 32,212,254,720 binary bytes you would expect.
• Another trivial point is that in the metric system the "k" or "kilo" prefix is always lowercase (i.e. kilogram = kg not Kg) but since these binary uses for data storage capacity are not properly metric, it has become standard to use an uppercase "K" for the binary form.
• When used to describe Data Transfer Rate, bits/bytes are calculated as in the metric system
  • Kilobits per second is usually shortened to kbps or Kbps. Although technically speaking, the term kilobit should have a lowercase initial letter, it has become common to capitalize it in abbreviation (e.g. "56 Kbps" or "56K"). The simple "K" might seem ambiguous but, in the context of data transfer, it can be assumed that the measurement is in bits rather than bytes unless indicated otherwise.