Convert Floppy Disk (5.25", DD) (floppy (5.25" DD)) to Kilobyte (10^3 bytes) (kB (10^3)) instantly.
About these units
Floppy Disk (5.25", DD) (floppy (5.25" DD))
The 5.25-inch DD floppy stored roughly 360 KB (IBM PC) or 1.2 MB (Apple II and others) depending on format. These flexible disks dominated early personal computing in the 1980s. They were physically fragile but offered an affordable way to distribute software, operating systems, and games. The vast majority of early PC software—from Lotus 1-2-3 to original DOS versions—shipped on 5.25" disks. Their shape and texture became symbols of the early PC revolution, despite their low reliability, susceptibility to dust, and limited capacity.
Kilobyte (10^3 bytes) (kB (10^3))
A decimal kilobyte equals 1,000 bytes, reflecting the SI prefix kilo = 10³. Storage device manufacturers standardize on this definition because it scales cleanly and simplifies marketing and specification. This creates a mismatch with binary kilobytes (1,024 bytes) historically used in RAM and file systems. As storage capacities grew, this discrepancy became increasingly noticeable, leading standards bodies to promote explicit binary prefixes (KiB, MiB) for clarity. Despite these efforts, decimal kilobytes remain dominant in contexts such as hard drives, flash memory packaging, and communication standards.