Storage Math That Survives Procurement

The NAS spec sheet said 100 TB. The OS mounted 90.9 TiB. Somebody signed the PO without checking base-2 vs base-10. These nine converters exist so that somebody isn't you.

TB →PB

1 PB = 1,024 TB. Cold-tier your S3 IA before the next quarterly bill arrives.

TB →PB Scaler →

PB →EB

Crossed 1 PB? Next stop: exabyte. Scale the Ceph cluster before the purchase order lands.

PB →EB Scaler →

GiB vs GB — The 6.9% Lie

Box: 1 TB. OS: 931 GB. Nobody stole 69 GB. It's base-10 vs base-2. Quantify the gap on every drive you buy.

GiB vs GB Analyzer →

Token Count →Storage

1B tokens × 4 bytes = 4 GB raw. Then tokenizer overhead. Then dataset metadata. Size the data lake before the GPUs sit idle.

Token →Storage Estimator →

IOPS →Throughput

10K IOPS × 16K blocks = 160 MB/s ceiling. Your app needs 250 MB/s. You're bottlenecked. Fix it before the DBA pages you.

IOPS →Throughput →

DB Rows →Storage

50M rows. 3 indexes. 200 bytes/row. That's 30 GB before WAL, before replication lag. Size the RDS instance correctly.

Row →Storage Profiler →

Redis RAM Inflation

4 GB JSON on disk. 6— GB in Redis with hashtable-encoding overhead. Model the heap before you hit SWAP at peak traffic.

Redis RAM Profiler →

Video Encoding Optimizer

H.264 vs H.265 vs AV1 vs VP9 — file size, bitrate, and encoding time compared. Content-type presets + CRF reverse calculator. Find the CRF that hits your target file size.

Video Encoding Optimizer →

Parquet vs CSV Compression

150 GB CSV → 15 GB Parquet with Snappy. Columnar storage + predicate pushdown. Athena queries drop 10× in cost. S3 bill drops 90%.

Parquet vs CSV Profiler →

KV Cache VRAM Inflation

32K context window. Every 1K tokens burns more VRAM. At long sequences, KV cache dwarfs model weights. Map it before you provision.

KV Cache Profiler →

📰 Deep dives on this topic

The 191 Problem: Why VARCHAR(255) Is Not 255 Bytes

A column length is declared in characters and enforced in bytes. 191 is 767 ÷ 4; 255 is where a latin1 prefix doubles; 63 is where utf8mb4 does. The same VARCHAR(255) reserves 1,022 bytes and caps a table at 64 of them.

Read the briefing →

The Missing Cent: Why a Bill Does Not Add Up

Three failures wear one decimal point and sit ten orders of magnitude apart. A million rows summed drift by $0.0000002; the same rows rounded to cents each can lose the entire $4,900.

Read the briefing →

The 0.25 Rule: Why IOPS and Throughput Are One Limit

Every cloud converts IOPS to throughput at 0.25 MiB/s, so one IOPS is worth 256 KiB and each volume type has a break-even I/O size. On gp3 it is 25.6 KiB — above that, a volume provisioned at 80,000 IOPS delivers 32,000.

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The Key Tax: Why Your Redis Memory Is Never Your Dataset Size

Redis charges a fixed toll on every key before your data is counted. One gigabyte of data costs 1.68 GB at ten million 100-byte keys and 1.00 GB at ten thousand 100 KB values — and the encoding you pick, not the instance size, decides which.

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The Attention Gap: Why Your KV Cache Estimate Is 8× Too Big

Write the per-token KV cache as kv_heads × (d_model / kv_heads) and the KV head count cancels, leaving full multi-head attention — an 8× overestimate. A 70B with 64 attention heads and 8 KV heads needs 2.62 GB at 8K, not 20.97 GB.

Read the briefing →

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