How Do We Determine the Number of Gigabytes?

Our file servers report on the number of bytes stored in each client folder. We convert that figure to gigabytes for pricing purposes.

There are two approaches for converting bytes to gigabytes. The most commonly used method is based on the metric system and uses 1000 as the factorial. Following that approach, 1000 bytes equals a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes equals a megabyte, 1000 megabytes equals a gigabyte and so on.

The other method follows the binary system and uses factors of 2. Thus, 2¹⁰ bytes equals a kilobyte, 2¹⁰ kilobytes equals a megabyte, and 2¹⁰ megabytes equals a gigabyte. Because two to the 10th power equals 1024, that number is sometimes used as a divisor rather than 1000.

We follow the metric standard and divide byte counts by factors of 1000. Taking this approach, if the file system reports that a client folder contains 3,430,230,145 bytes, we report it as 3.4 gigabytes (3,430 megabytes). Our practice is to round off gigabytes to the nearest decimal place.

This is the approach recommended by many standards bodies and government authorities including:

• The International System of Units (ISU)
• The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• The European Union (EU)
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Many of these organizations recommend that the term megabyte (and gigabyte) be used strictly to describe metric calculations based on 1000² bytes and 1000³ bytes and that the terms "mebibyte" and "gibibyte" be used for binary calculations based on 2¹⁰ and 2²⁰.

You can read more about this in the Wikipedia article on the definition of "gigabyte." It also provides references to the original source materials from the various standards bodies. 

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