Kilobytes to Gibibits (kB to Gibit)

1 kilobyte equals 0.000007450580597 gibibits (rounded).

How to convert kilobytes to gibibits

To convert kilobytes to gibibits, multiply the number of kilobytes by 0.000007450580597. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply gibibits by 134,217.728.

gibibits = kilobytes × 0.000007450580597

Example: 10 kilobytes = 0.00007450580597 gibibits.

Decimal prefixes (kB, MB, GB) are powers of 1,000; binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB) are powers of 1,024. Storage makers use decimal; Windows reports binary but labels it GB.

About these units

Kilobyte (kB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000 bytes in the SI (decimal) definition. Older software and Windows sometimes use KB to mean 1,024 bytes; see kibibyte.

Few units have had two meanings for so long. By the mid-1960s most computers used binary addressing, so memory sizes came in powers of two and engineers borrowed kilo to mean 1,024. IBM documentation for the System/360 in 1964 used an uppercase K for 1,024. Hard disk makers took a different path from the start. The IEC later settled the question: kilobyte, symbol kB, means 1,000 bytes, and 1,024 bytes is a kibibyte.

Floppy disks show the muddle. The Shugart SA-400 of 1976 held 109,375 bytes unformatted and was advertised as 110 Kbyte, the decimal way, while a 1978 Tandon double-density disk held 368,640 bytes, or 360 times 1,024, and was sold as 360 KB. Windows still divides by 1,024, so a 65,536-byte file appears as 64 KB there, while Mac OS X Snow Leopard and later would call it 66 kB. A kilobyte is also tiny: Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado is 12,843 bytes.

1 kilobyte = 1,000 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilobyte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples

Gibibit (Gibit)

ComputingCurrent unit

Exactly 1,073,741,824 bits.

Equal to 2^30 bits, or 1,073,741,824 bits, the gibibit (Gibit) is the unit behind many memory chip densities. Dividing by eight gives 134,217,728 bytes, which is 128 mebibytes. The gibi prefix, from the first two letters of giga plus bi, was among the first three binary prefixes the IEC approved in December 1998.

Its decimal cousin, the gigabit, is 10^9 bits, so a gibibit is about 7.4 percent larger. That gap is why a quantity described in gigabits and the same quantity in binary units can differ noticeably when the two conventions are mixed. Telecom speeds are quoted in decimal gigabits per second, while the gibi names exist so that a binary count can be stated without ambiguity.

The symbol Gibit is a bit count; the byte equivalent, with capital B, is the gibibyte, GiB, which is eight times larger.

1 gibibit = 134,217,728 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Binary prefix; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Bit

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.