Terabytes to Nibbles (TB to nibble)

1 terabyte equals 2,000,000,000,000 nibbles exactly.

How to convert terabytes to nibbles

To convert terabytes to nibbles, multiply the number of terabytes by 2,000,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply nibbles by 5×10⁻¹³.

nibbles = terabytes × 2,000,000,000,000

Example: 10 terabytes = 20,000,000,000,000 nibbles.

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

Nibble (nibble)

ComputingTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Four bits, or half a byte. One hexadecimal digit.

Computing slang supplied this name: if a byte is a bite, half of one is a nibble. Wikipedia reports that David B. Benson, a professor at Washington State University, may have coined it as a joke in 1958, and that the spelling nybble, echoing byte, appeared in computing magazines in the early 1980s. Other names for the same thing include half-byte, tetrad, quadbit and semi-octet.

A nibble is four bits, enough to hold one of 16 values, which is exactly one hexadecimal digit. That is why a byte of eight bits is written as two hex digits. IBM mainframes used nibbles in packed decimal, storing one decimal digit per nibble with the last one reserved for the sign, and early four-bit microprocessors and calculators worked on nibble-sized words.

It is a binary count, not a decimal or SI unit. The figure used here is 0.5 byte, or 4 bits.

1 nibble = 0.5 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Nibble; Wikipedia: Byte

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.