Terabits to Kilobytes (Tb to kB)

1 terabit equals 125,000,000 kilobytes exactly.

1 terabit = 125,000,000 kilobytes

How to convert terabits to kilobytes

To convert terabits to kilobytes, multiply the number of terabits by 125,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilobytes by 8×10⁻⁹.

kilobytes = terabits × 125,000,000

Example: 10 terabits = 1,250,000,000 kilobytes.

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

Terabit (Tb)

ComputingCurrent unit

10¹² bits (125 GB).

Network engineers reach for the terabit because link speeds are quoted in bits per second, and Wikipedia's article on the bit confirms that transfer rates conventionally use decimal SI multiples. One terabit is exactly 10^12 bits, which at eight bits per byte is 125,000,000,000 bytes, or 125 gigabytes. Tera, adopted into the SI in 1960, is the first prefix after giga.

The commonly used symbol is Tbit, and the IEEE 1541 standard recommends lowercase b, giving Tb. That shorthand is risky because capital B means byte, a factor of eight apart. In the IEC naming, a terabit is a decimal unit; its binary counterpart, the tebibit, is 2^40 bits, about 10 percent larger.

Because it is quoted in bits, the terabit suits data rates, where terabits per second describe very high-capacity links, and it is eight times smaller than the terabyte.

1 terabit = 125,000,000,000 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Bit; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; Wikipedia: Binary prefix

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

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.