Terabytes to Kibibits (TB to Kibit)

1 terabyte equals 7,812,500,000 kibibits exactly.

1 terabyte = 7,812,500,000 kibibits

How to convert terabytes to kibibits

To convert terabytes to kibibits, multiply the number of terabytes by 7,812,500,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kibibits by 1.28×10⁻¹⁰.

kibibits = terabytes × 7,812,500,000

Example: 10 terabytes = 78,125,000,000 kibibits.

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

Kibibit (Kibit)

ComputingCurrent unit

Exactly 1,024 bits.

Before 1999, a kilobit was often loosely taken to mean 1,024 bits as well as 1,000, and the IEC prefix kibi settled the matter. A kibibit (Kibit) is exactly 2^10 bits, which is 1,024 bits or 128 bytes. The IEC adopted the prefix in December 1998, and the BIPM's vocabulary of metrology notes that 1 kilobit should not be used to mean 1,024 bits.

The name starts with the first two letters of kilo and adds bi for binary, and the symbol writes the K as a capital to match the other binary prefixes. The difference from the decimal kilobit is 2.4 percent, the smallest of any pair.

The unit is a small one, equal to 128 bytes, and appears mainly where an exact binary bit count has to be stated without the ambiguity of kilobit.

1 kibibit = 128 bytes (exactly).

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

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.