TiB

TiB, short for tebibyte, is a unit of digital information storage equal to 2^40 bytes (1,099,511,627,776 bytes). It is the binary counterpart to the terabyte (TB) and is part of the IEC binary prefixes, which also include KiB, MiB, and GiB. One TiB equals 1,024 GiB.

In decimal terms, a terabyte denotes 10^12 bytes, so 1 TB ≈ 0.9095 TiB; conversely, 1 TiB ≈ 1.0995 TB. For example, a drive marketed as 2 TB (2 × 10^12 bytes) contains about 1.819 TiB. This difference in base 2 versus base 10 can cause apparent discrepancies when capacities are reported by different systems or vendors.

Usage and context: TiB is commonly used to describe memory and storage capacities in computing, such as RAM sizes, server storage, and filesystem quotas. Some operating systems and software report sizes using binary prefixes (TiB, GiB) to reflect actual binary-based sizes, while hardware manufacturers typically advertise capacities using decimal TB.

History and standardization: The binary prefixes were introduced to reduce confusion between decimal and binary scales. TiB is the official binary unit corresponding to 2^40 bytes, part of the broader effort to standardize binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB) for precise sizing. Despite standardization, TB remains prevalent in marketing, contributing to ongoing ambiguity in reported storage capacities.