| Tebibits (Tibit) | Yobibits (Yibit) |
|---|---|
| 1 Tebibit | 9.09494701773 × 10-13 Yibit |
| 2 Tebibits | 1.81898940355 × 10-12 Yibit |
| 3 Tebibits | 2.72848410532 × 10-12 Yibit |
| 4 Tebibits | 3.63797880709 × 10-12 Yibit |
| 5 Tebibits | 4.54747350886 × 10-12 Yibit |
| 10 Tebibits | 9.09494701773 × 10-12 Yibit |
| 20 Tebibits | 1.81898940355 × 10-11 Yibit |
| 25 Tebibits | 2.27373675443 × 10-11 Yibit |
| 50 Tebibits | 4.54747350886 × 10-11 Yibit |
| 100 Tebibits | 9.09494701773 × 10-11 Yibit |
| Reference | Tebibits (Tibit) | Yobibits (Yibit) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 0.00000000116415 Tibit | 1.05879 × 10-21 Yibit |
| A three-minute MP3 | 0.0000218279 Tibit | 1.98523 × 10-17 Yibit |
| A smartphone photo | 0.0000291038 Tibit | 2.64698 × 10-17 Yibit |
| A high-definition film | 0.0291038 Tibit | 2.64698 × 10-14 Yibit |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 0.363798 Tibit | 3.30872 × 10-13 Yibit |
The tebibit is a unit of digital information equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bits, which is 1,024 gibibits or two to the fortieth power. Its symbol is Tibit. It is the binary counterpart of the terabit, and the two now differ by 10 per cent, the point at which the distinction stops being pedantic and starts being financial.
That ten per cent is the reason the IEC prefixes exist. At the kibibit the discrepancy was 2.4 per cent and could be waved away; here it is a tenth of the quantity. In a contract for storage hardware, in a service agreement that guarantees capacity, or in a specification that a supplier must meet, a tenth is the difference between compliance and breach.
The unit's real home is flash memory, where dies are now made with capacities of one tebibit and above by stacking cell layers vertically. A modern flash die may hold a tebibit or two, and a package containing eight of them holds a teraoctet of raw capacity, from which spare blocks and management overhead are subtracted before anything reaches the user.
A tebibit is 137,438,953,472 octets, or 128 gibioctets. In practical terms it is the storage of a mid-range phone, or a couple of hours of uncompressed high-resolution video. The unit describes the raw material of storage devices rather than anything a person handles directly.
Filesystems also count in binary at this scale. A volume reported as 16 tebibytes by one tool and 17.6 terabytes by another is the same volume, and the difference is entirely in the base of the arithmetic. Anyone administering storage learns to check which convention a tool uses before comparing two numbers from different sources.
Correct notation is Tibit, with the capital T and lowercase i. It appears in flash memory datasheets, in filesystem documentation and in standards, and almost nowhere else. The presence of that lowercase i is the only reliable signal that a figure is binary, which is why careful technical writing uses it even when the difference seems small.
One tebibit equals 1,099,511,627,776 bits, 1,024 gibibits, 137,438,953,472 octets, or about 1.100 terabits.
The yobibit is a unit of digital information equal to two to the eightieth power bits, which is 1,024 zebibits. Its symbol is Yibit. It is the largest of the binary prefixes defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission, and the binary counterpart of the yottabit.
At this step the two conventions differ by 20.9 per cent. That gap is the culmination of the argument for the binary prefixes: a naming habit that was 2.4 per cent wrong at the kibibit is now a fifth wrong, which no engineering document can tolerate. The IEC series stops here because the decimal series stopped at yotta when it was defined in 1998.
When the metric system gained ronna and quetta in 2022, the binary series was not extended to match. There are no accepted names above yobi, so a quantity of two to the ninetieth bits has no short form and must be written out. This is a gap in the system that will presumably be filled when someone needs it, though at present nothing comes close.
A yobibit is 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 octets, or 128 zebioctets. The world's entire stock of data is somewhere in the low hundreds of zettaoctets, which is a fraction of a per cent of a yobioctet. Nothing at this scale has been built, is being built, or is presently planned.
The unit is nevertheless properly defined, and that completeness has a purpose. A measurement system whose rules run out at a certain size forces every future user to invent an extension, and competing extensions are how ambiguity begins. Defining the whole ladder in advance costs nothing and prevents that.
For anyone reading technical documents, the practical lesson of the whole binary series is the lowercase i. Kibit, Mibit, Gibit, Tibit, Pibit, Eibit, Zibit and Yibit are binary; kbit, Mbit, Gbit, Tbit, Pbit, Ebit, Zbit and Ybit are decimal; and the difference between them grows from negligible to a fifth as you climb. A writer who omits the i has left the reader to guess.
One yobibit equals 1,024 zebibits, 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 octets, or about 1.209 yottabits.