Why a GB and a GiB Give Different Numbers
A decimal gigabyte contains one billion bytes.
Use the complete unit label
A decimal gigabyte contains one billion bytes. A gibibyte contains 1,024 cubed bytes. Both describe storage amounts, but their numerical values differ for the same quantity of bytes. Keep the label when copying a conversion.
Work through one gigabyte
Dividing 1,000,000,000 by 1,073,741,824 gives about 0.9313 GiB. Nothing was lost in that conversion; the size of the reporting unit changed. This explains one common source of apparently different capacity figures.
Separate bytes from transfer rates
Storage units describe an amount. A network transfer figure may use bits per second, which describes a rate. A megabyte amount cannot be compared directly with a megabit-per-second rate without both a unit conversion and a time calculation.
Do not infer overhead from the unit change
Reserved storage, formatting and filesystem metadata are separate effects. Converting GB to GiB does not measure any of them. Use actual device and filesystem information when investigating missing usable space.
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