Terabytes to Kilobytes (TB to kB)
1 terabyte equals 1,000,000,000 kilobytes exactly.
How to convert terabytes to kilobytes
To convert terabytes to kilobytes, multiply the number of terabytes by 1,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilobytes by 1×10⁻⁹.
kilobytes = terabytes × 1,000,000,000
Example: 10 terabytes = 10,000,000,000 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
Terabyte (TB)
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
Kilobyte (kB)
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
- Kilobytes to terabytes (reverse)
- Terabytes to bytes
- Terabytes to megabytes
- Terabytes to gigabytes
- Terabytes to bits
- Terabytes to petabytes
- Terabytes to kibibytes
- Terabytes to mebibytes
- Terabytes to gibibytes
- Terabytes to tebibytes
- Terabytes to kilobits
- Terabytes to megabits
- Terabytes to gigabits
- Bytes to kilobytes
- Megabytes to kilobytes
- Gigabytes to kilobytes
- Bits to kilobytes
- Petabytes to kilobytes
- Kibibytes to kilobytes
- Mebibytes to kilobytes
- Gibibytes to kilobytes
- Tebibytes to kilobytes
- Kilobits to kilobytes
- Megabits to kilobytes
- Gigabits to kilobytes
See all digital storage units.