SavingBits

Every byte, counted

How much fits, how long it takes, and why the numbers don't match.

Calculators for storage and data sizes, with the arithmetic shown, the assumptions stated and the sources named.

fit on ≈ 64,000 12 MP HEIF photos
A glass jar filling up with bits: orange ones and cream zeros, stacked in bytes 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 BYTE = 8 BITS

Calculators

How much fits Photos, songs, hours of video or documents on any card, drive or phone. Download time Any file size at any connection speed, with real-world overhead. GB vs GiB Decimal vs binary units, and why a 1 TB drive shows 931 GB. Video file size File size from bitrate and length, or the bitrate a size allows. Phone storage planner Share out your phone's space between photos, video and music. Cloud backup time How long the first full upload (seeding) takes on your upload speed. Data cap planner How much Netflix, YouTube, Spotify or Zoom fits in a monthly cap. Compression ratio Ratios vs percentages, and a live gzip test on your own text.

Numbers worth knowing

931GBwhat Windows shows for a 1 TB drive80sfor 1 GB at 100 Mbps, before overhead7GB/hNetflix 4K, the service's own upper figure÷8turns Mbps into MB/s400MBone minute of iPhone 4K at 60 fps94.9%the most of a line a TCP download can use

Popular answers

Photos

All 5 photos answers →

Music

Video

All 8 video answers →

Downloads

All 7 downloads answers →

Uploads and backup

Streaming data

All 7 streaming data answers →

Data caps

Units

All 9 units answers →

Compression

How we count

Storage is sold in decimal units (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes), so that is our default. Flip the GB / GiB switch at the top to see sizes the way Windows counts them. Internet speeds are megabits per second, and downloads include a stated allowance for overhead. Figures a service publishes itself are labelled published, figures we worked out from a published bitrate are computed, and our own typical values are estimate. We check fifteen results against independently known values on every build: see the methodology.