tibibyte

The tebibyte, symbol TiB, is a unit of digital information defined as 2^40 bytes, which equals 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. It is part of the IEC binary prefix set (kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, pebi-, ect) used to denote powers of two in contrast to the decimal prefixes used with bytes. The official name is tebibyte; TiB is the common abbreviation. The term tibibyte is sometimes used in informal writing, but tebibyte is the correct standard name.

One tebibyte comprises 1024 gibibytes, and each gibibyte comprises 1024 mebibytes, continuing the binary scale. In other words, 1 TiB = 1024 GiB = 1,048,576 MiB = 1,073,741,824 KiB. This binary framing aligns with how computers address memory and storage in powers of two.

In decimal terms, a tebibyte is approximately 1.0995 terabytes (TB), since a terabyte equals 10^12 bytes. Consequently, 1 TiB ≈ 1.0995 × 10^12 bytes. This difference between binary (TiB) and decimal (TB) definitions can cause confusion when vendor capacities are listed in decimal terabytes while operating systems report binary tebibytes.

Usage and context: Tebibytes are commonly used to describe computer memory capacities, server storage, and large-scale data devices where binary addressing is relevant. Some software and hardware manufacturers display capacities in TiB or TiB-equivalents, while other contexts still use decimal TB. Understanding the distinction helps avoid misinterpreting disk and memory sizes.