Data & Storage calculators

Which data calculator to use

Storage sizes come in two systems: decimal units, where a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes, and binary units, where a gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. The data storage converter moves between them, which is why a drive sold as 1 TB shows about 931 GiB in an operating system that counts in binary. For arrays of drives, the RAID and ZFS capacity calculator works out the usable space left after parity or mirroring, and the ZFS RAM, SLOG and special vdev calculator sizes the memory, metadata devices and log device a ZFS pool needs. To size the disks a backup needs, the 3-2-1 backup and GFS retention calculator totals the fulls and incrementals each copy keeps.

Network speeds are quoted in bits per second while files are measured in bytes. The bandwidth calculator converts Mbps to MB/s and to data per hour, and the download time calculator turns a file size and a connection speed into a transfer time.

For video, the video file size calculator works out the size of a recording from its bitrate and length, and the live streaming and HLS bitrate calculator sizes an adaptive bitrate ladder along with the upload and viewer bandwidth it needs. The aspect ratio calculator reduces a width and height to their simplest ratio, which helps when a resolution has to be scaled without stretching the picture.