Kilobytes to Nibbles (kB to nibble)

1 kilobyte equals 2,000 nibbles exactly.

How to convert kilobytes to nibbles

To convert kilobytes to nibbles, multiply the number of kilobytes by 2,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply nibbles by 0.0005.

nibbles = kilobytes × 2,000

Example: 10 kilobytes = 20,000 nibbles.

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

Nibble (nibble)

ComputingTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Four bits, or half a byte. One hexadecimal digit.

Computing slang supplied this name: if a byte is a bite, half of one is a nibble. Wikipedia reports that David B. Benson, a professor at Washington State University, may have coined it as a joke in 1958, and that the spelling nybble, echoing byte, appeared in computing magazines in the early 1980s. Other names for the same thing include half-byte, tetrad, quadbit and semi-octet.

A nibble is four bits, enough to hold one of 16 values, which is exactly one hexadecimal digit. That is why a byte of eight bits is written as two hex digits. IBM mainframes used nibbles in packed decimal, storing one decimal digit per nibble with the last one reserved for the sign, and early four-bit microprocessors and calculators worked on nibble-sized words.

It is a binary count, not a decimal or SI unit. The figure used here is 0.5 byte, or 4 bits.

1 nibble = 0.5 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Nibble; Wikipedia: Byte

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.