Terabytes to Mebibits (TB to Mibit)

1 terabyte equals 7,629,394.531 mebibits (rounded).

How to convert terabytes to mebibits

To convert terabytes to mebibits, multiply the number of terabytes by 7,629,394.531. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply mebibits by 1.31072×10⁻⁷.

mebibits = terabytes × 7,629,394.531

Example: 10 terabytes = 76,293,945.31 mebibits.

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

Mebibit (Mibit)

ComputingCurrent unit

Exactly 1,048,576 bits.

Mebibit means 2^20 bits exactly, which is 1,048,576 bits, or 131,072 bytes (128 kibibytes). It comes from the IEC's 1998 binary prefix set, with mebi formed from the first two letters of mega plus bi. The symbol is Mibit.

Compared with the decimal megabit of 1,000,000 bits, a mebibit is about 4.9 percent larger. As an arithmetic example, 16 mebibits come to 16 x 1,048,576 = 16,777,216 bits, which is 2 mebibytes. Serial links and network speeds, by contrast, are conventionally counted in decimal megabits per second.

NIST's page on binary prefixes explains the intended pronunciation, with the first syllable said like the matching SI prefix and the second as bee.

1 mebibit = 131,072 bytes (exactly).

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

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.