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[New] How Many Kilobytes are in a Megabyte?
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I think the content of this article should be revisited. This is a fairly confusing topic (storage units are a mess!) and it would do well to have clear, accurate, and concise answers within our documentation. A common reason people seek more information on these units of storage is to understand the difference between base 10 (KB, MB, GB, etc) and base 2 (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc). This is especially confusing because operating systems and services often use base 10 unit designations to describe base 2 data.
Is a kilobyte 1000 bytes or is it 1024 bytes? There's varying answers out there and, in my opinion, it's beneficial to cover the common consensus as well as the actual standards of measurement. KB, GB, TB are base 10 as defined by standards. They sometimes are used to describe base 2, though KiB, GiB, and TiB were created as base 2 storage units to make a clear distinction. Adoption and public knowledge of KiB, GiB, and TiB isn't widespread and, as such, leads to the general public being confused about storage units.
As an example, within File Explorer, Windows calculates sizes using base 2 (GiB) but displays units as base 10 (GB). This means a 500 GB drive might appear as 465 GB in Windows. The size of the drive hasn't changed, it's just that Windows isn't using the standard (which would be 465 GiB or 500 GB - not 465 GB).
I haven't researched this topic for a few years now, so I could have misspoke on a point or two, though this is my current understanding of storage units.
