What does Microsoft mean when they use TB for these storage options?

Question

Hi, just wondering what Azure mean when they refer to TB in local storage. These are the series I was looking at:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes/gpu-accelerated/nd-gb200-v6-series

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes/gpu-accelerated/nd-gb300-v6-series

The table definition notes that "Storage capacity is shown in units of GiB or 1024^3 bytes."

However, there is no mention of TB.

Is the TB that is being used here 1000GB or 1024GB? Or could it even be possibly referring to TiB, as if GiB of storage is being used, then it would make sense that Microsoft talks about storage in binary units, in which case 1 TiB = 1024GiB.

If anyone could help clarify that would be great.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello @Leo Shi ,

Thank you for your patience while we investigated this.

We've confirmed with the Microsoft Engineering team that the local storage capacity for the ND GB200-v6 and ND GB300-v6 series (for example, 16 TB across 4 disks for the Standard_ND128isr_NDR_GB200_v6 size) is measured in decimal TB (1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes), not TiB or GiB.

We're updating the documentation to reflect this by replacing the GiB note with TB for these VM series to prevent confusion.

Thank you again for bringing this to our attention-> your feedback helps us improve our documentation.

We hope this clarifies your question and supports your planning.

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Answer 2

In the context of Azure storage, when referring to TB (terabytes), it typically aligns with the decimal system, where 1 TB equals 1000 GB. However, it's important to note that Azure also provides storage capacity in GiB (gibibytes), which is based on the binary system, where 1 GiB equals 1024 MiB.

The documentation mentions that storage capacity is shown in units of GiB or 1024^3 bytes, indicating that when they refer to GiB, they are using the binary measurement. Therefore, if Azure were to refer to TB in a similar binary context, it would likely be using TiB (tebibytes), where 1 TiB equals 1024 GiB.

However, the specific mention of TB in Azure documentation usually refers to the decimal measurement unless explicitly stated otherwise. Therefore, it is safe to assume that TB refers to 1000 GB in most instances unless the context indicates otherwise.