About data size units
The confusion between decimal and binary units is a decades-old IT headache: hard drive manufacturers advertise in SI units (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) while operating systems traditionally report in binary units (1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes). A 1 TB drive shows as ~931 GiB in Windows. The IEC 80000-13 standard formalised kibibyte (KiB), mebibyte (MiB) and gibibyte (GiB) in 1998 to end the ambiguity, but legacy usage of KB/MB/GB in the binary sense persists. When sizing cloud storage, memory, or network transfers, clarifying which convention applies can prevent significant budget or capacity miscalculations.