Infrastructure & Architecture

Cloud Storage Converter

Scale storage requirements from Gigabytes to Petabytes and estimate object capacity for cloud workloads.

In GiB (Binary)
931.32
In MB (Decimal)
1,000,000
High-Res Photos (5MB) 200,000
Full HD Movies (4GB) 250
Raw Logs (10KB) 100M+

Provider Estimates ($/mo)

AWS S3 Standard $0.023/GB
$23.00
Azure Blob (Hot) $0.018/GB
$18.43
Google Cloud Storage $0.020/GB
$20.00
Costs are based on public pricing as of 2024. Does not include egress or API fees.

Understanding Cloud Storage Units

Decimal vs Binary

Cloud providers use Decimal (base-10) for billing (1 TB = 1,000 GB), but operating systems like Windows and Linux use Binary (base-2) for display (1 TiB = 1,024 GiB). This leads to the "missing space" phenomenon where a 1TB drive shows as ~931GB in your OS.

Storage Classes

Capacity is only one factor. Standard/Hot storage is for active data, while Cold/Glacier storage is much cheaper (often <$0.001/GB) but charges significant fees for data retrieval.

Scaling Cheat Sheet
  • 1,000 GB = 1 Terabyte (TB)
  • 1,000 TB = 1 Petabyte (PB)
  • 1,000 PB = 1 Exabyte (EB)
  • 1,000 EB = 1 Zettabyte (ZB)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between S3 and Elastic Block Store?

S3 is Object Storage (accessible via API, infinitely scalable). EBS is Block Storage (like a hard drive attached to a single virtual machine).

How much does 1 Petabyte cost per month?

In S3 Standard, 1PB costs roughly $23,000/mo. In Glacier Deep Archive, the same 1PB costs only $990/mo, but accessing it can take 12+ hours.

Why do providers use Decimal instead of Binary?

It makes marketing and billing easier. 1 Terabyte sounds bigger as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes than 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

What is Data Egress?

Egress is the cost of moving data out of the cloud to the internet. While storage might be cheap, egress can often cost $0.05 - $0.09 per GB.