byteequivalents

Byte equivalents refer to the standard units used to express digital information sizes relative to the byte. The byte is the basic addressable data unit in most computer architectures and consists of 8 bits.

Sizes are expressed using prefixes based on either powers of 10 or powers of 2. In decimal usage, kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte denote 1,000, 1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000 bytes, respectively. In binary usage, the corresponding units are kibibyte (KiB) = 1,024 bytes, mebibyte (MiB) = 1,048,576 bytes, and gibibyte (GiB) = 1,073,741,824 bytes. The binary prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi) were introduced by the IEC to resolve ambiguity with the traditional SI prefixes, which have commonly been used for powers of 1024 in some contexts.

In practice, storage devices often label capacities using decimal prefixes (for example, a 1 TB drive represents 1,000,000,000,000 bytes), while operating systems may display sizes in binary equivalents (often as TiB or GiB). This can lead to apparent discrepancies when comparing sizes across interfaces. For example, a 1 TB drive may appear as about 0.91 TiB in a system that uses binary prefixes.

Byte equivalents also intersect with data transfer and encodings. Data rates are typically expressed in bits per second, whereas data volumes are expressed in bytes. Since 1 byte equals 8 bits, conversion between these units is a common task when estimating transfer times or storage requirements.