Kilobyte
| kilobyte | |
|---|---|
| Unit system | Unit derived from bit |
| Unit of | Digital information, data size |
| Symbol | kB |
| Decimal | Binary | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value | SI | Value | IEC | JEDEC | |||||
| 1000 | 103 | kB | kilobyte | 1024 | 210 | KiB | kibibyte | KB | kilobyte |
| 10002 | 106 | MB | megabyte | 10242 | 220 | MiB | mebibyte | MB | megabyte |
| 10003 | 109 | GB | gigabyte | 10243 | 230 | GiB | gibibyte | GB | gigabyte |
| 10004 | 1012 | TB | terabyte | 10244 | 240 | TiB | tebibyte | TB | terabyte |
| 10005 | 1015 | PB | petabyte | 10245 | 250 | PiB | pebibyte | — | |
| 10006 | 1018 | EB | exabyte | 10246 | 260 | EiB | exbibyte | — | |
| 10007 | 1021 | ZB | zettabyte | 10247 | 270 | ZiB | zebibyte | — | |
| 10008 | 1024 | YB | yottabyte | 10248 | 280 | YiB | yobibyte | — | |
| 10009 | 1027 | RB | ronnabyte | 10249 | 290 | RiB | robibyte | — | |
| 100010 | 1030 | QB | quettabyte | 102410 | 2100 | QiB | quebibyte | — | |
| Orders of magnitude of data | |||||||||
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information.
The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as a multiplication factor of 1000 (103); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. The internationally recommended unit symbol for the kilobyte is kB.
In some areas of information technology, particularly in reference to random-access memory capacity, kilobyte instead often refers to 1024 (210) bytes. This arises from the prevalence of sizes that are powers of two in modern digital memory architectures, coupled with the coincidence that 210 differs from 103 by 2.4%.
The kibibyte is defined as 1024 bytes, avoiding the ambiguity issues of the kilobyte.