Terabytes to Gibibits (TB to Gibit)

1 terabyte equals 7,450.580597 gibibits (rounded).

How to convert terabytes to gibibits

To convert terabytes to gibibits, multiply the number of terabytes by 7,450.580597. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply gibibits by 0.000134217728.

gibibits = terabytes × 7,450.580597

Example: 10 terabytes = 74,505.80597 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

Terabyte (TB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000 gigabytes (10¹² bytes), the capacity of a typical modern hard drive.

Tera comes from the SI prefix for 10 to the twelfth, so a terabyte is one million million bytes. Computer memory is binary, so the prefixes were once used for powers of two, which caused confusion. IUPAC proposed binary prefixes such as kibi, mebi and gibi in 1995, and the IEC adopted them in December 1998 and published the standard in January 1999. The tebibyte is the binary counterpart, about 9 percent larger than the terabyte.

Hitachi introduced the first one-terabyte consumer hard drive in 2007. For scale, one terabyte is about 20 standard Blu-ray discs or 213 DVDs. The mismatch shows at this size: a drive sold as 1 TB may be reported as about 931 GB, because Windows uses the historic binary convention. macOS and iOS did the same until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iOS 10, then switched to powers of 10.

1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Terabyte; 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.