Category
Storage Tools & Calculators
Compute storage capacities across both standard byte formats. Account for drive manufacturer decimal labeling versus operating system binary reporting.
These tools answer planning questions about disk space: what a drive really holds once formatted, how long a transfer at a given bandwidth will take, and how filesystem overhead changes effective capacity. They complement the pure unit converters by modeling real-world behavior, not just arithmetic.
Recommended Storage tools
Storage Capacity Calculator
Comprehensive multi-unit data storage converter covering 12 standard SI decimal and IEC binary units with simultaneous real-time conversion.
Mbps to MB/s Converter
Convert network bandwidth (Mbps) to operating system file download rates (MB/s).
MB/s to Mbps Converter
Convert file transfer metrics into required network bandwidth.
Download & Upload Time Calculator
Calculate download and upload times for any file size — covering game downloads, video uploads, and cloud backups — with real-world protocol overhead.
Video File Size & Bitrate Calculator
Comprehensive video calculator: estimate file sizes from bitrates, compute bitrates for upload file size targets, and calculate transfer times.
Advertised vs usable capacity
A 2 TB drive holds 2 × 10^12 bytes, which is why macOS reports it as 2 TB while Windows reports ~1.81 TB. Beyond the prefix difference, a formatted volume loses space to the file system itself: NTFS and ext4 reserve space for metadata and journaling (a few percent), and default cluster sizes waste space on volumes full of small files. Results here model the prefix discrepancy explicitly so the "missing" terabytes are accounted for.
Transfer time is optimistic by design
Time = size ÷ bandwidth assumes the link runs at its rated speed continuously. Real SATA SSDs, USB 3 hubs, and Wi-Fi connections sustain 60–90% of nominal throughput. If a calculation says a 50 GB backup takes 7 minutes at 1 Gbps, budget 8–10 minutes in practice.
Common mistakes
- Planning RAID capacity from raw disk size — usable space depends on the RAID level (mirroring halves it; parity costs one disk).
- Forgetting that cloud providers often bill in decimal GB while local tools report binary GiB.
- Comparing drive prices without normalizing to the same unit system first.