Units of measurement in storage vs networking

A common mistake that engineers do when referring to storage capacities is that they use the network bandwidth units instead of the storage units; They think that 1 MB is one Miegabyte of storage. That is incorrect. Storage capacities should be written using the IEC notation:

  • 1 kiB: one kibibyte
  • 1 MiB: one mebibyte
  • 1 GiB: one gibibyte
  • 1 TiB: one tebibyte
  • etc.

To express communication speed, throughput or bandwidth, values must be written using this notation: