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It depends which standard you use.

JEDEC standard:

A kilobyte is 2^10 = 1024 bytes (1 KB).

A megabyte is 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes (1 MB).

A gigabyte is 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1 GB).

Therefore 50 GB is 53,687,091,200 bytes which is 52,428,800 KB or 51,200 MB.

IEC binary standard:

A kilo-binary-byte (kibibyte) is 2^10 bytes = 1024 bytes (1 KiB).

A mega-binary-byte (mebibyte) is 2^20 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes (1 MiB).

A giga-binary-byte (gibibyte) is 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1 GiB).

Therefore 50 GiB is 53,687,091,200 bytes which is 52,428,800 KiB or 51,200 GiB.

IEC decimal standard:

A kilobyte is 10^3 = 1000 bytes (1 KB).

A megabyte is 10^6 = 1,000,000 bytes (1 MB).

A gigabyte is 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes (1 GB).

Therefore 50 GB is 50,000,000,000 bytes which is 50,000,000 KB or 50,000 MB.

Note that the JEDEC and IEC binary standards are the same, only the unit names differ, whereas JEDEC and IEC decimal standards use the same unit names but a different unit of measure. This naturally leads to much confusion, especially when the standard being used is generally unspecified.

Technically, the two IEC standards are correct because the "kilo-" prefix comes from the Greek for one thousand so 1024 bytes is really a kibibyte not a kilobyte. However, the JEDEC standard precedes the IEC standard and is still in use today. That is, when you buy a 4 GB memory chip you expect the chip to have exactly 4 * 2^30 bytes (4,294,967,296 bytes). Under IEC decimal, 4 GB would simply mean "approximately 4 billion bytes", which is technically correct. Unfortunately, hard-drive manufacturers chose to use the IEC decimal system because it makes their hard drives appear much larger than they actually are. That is, a 50 GB drive is really just a 47 GiB drive. It'll still have at least 50 billion bytes, but it is more than a little misleading when the operating system reports it only has 47 GB under the JEDEC standard.

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10y ago

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