Meaning & use
tibibytes
Last updated
“tibibytes” is a form of “tebibyte”.
Meanings
nounpluraltechnicalcomputing
Units of digital information equal to 2 to the 40th power bytes, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Grammar: Usually plural in prose, but the symbol TiB is used instead in technical writing: 2 TiB of storage.
Patterns
- a tebibyte of storage
- measured in tibibytes
- X tibibytes of data
The backup server holds about four tibibytes of archived video.
Engineers reported that the array had grown to twelve tibibytes.
A single tibibyte is slightly larger than a terabyte.
nouncountabletechnicalcomputing
A binary unit of memory or disk size used when exact powers of two matter.
Grammar: Countable when you talk about individual units: one tebibyte, two tebibytes.
Patterns
- one tebibyte
- several tebibytes
- a tebibyte-sized file
Cloud providers often price storage by the tebibyte rather than the terabyte.
The manual lists capacity in tebibytes to avoid rounding errors.
Word forms
| singular | tebibyte |
|---|
Common combinations
- tibibytes of storage
- The data center added fifty tibibytes of storage last quarter.
- measured in tibibytes
- File sizes at that scale are measured in tibibytes.
- a few tibibytes
- A few tibibytes should be enough for the whole project.
- tibibytes per second
- The new link transfers several tibibytes per second.
Synonyms and how they differ
- tebibyte
- The singular form of the same unit; use it when counting one unit rather than many.
- TiB
- The standard symbol; it is preferred in technical writing and never takes a plural -s.
Word family
- tebibyte noun
- The singular form of this binary data unit.
- gibibyte noun
- A smaller binary unit equal to 2 to the 30th power bytes.
- pebibyte noun
- The next larger binary unit, equal to 2 to the 50th power bytes.
Commonly confused: tibibytes or terabytes? tibibytes or tetrabytes?
tibibytes vs terabytes
A terabyte is 10 to the 12th power bytes, while a tebibyte is 2 to the 40th power bytes, so a tebibyte is about ten percent larger.
tibibytes vs tetrabytes
Tetrabytes is not a standard unit; it may be a misspelling or confusion with tebibytes or terabytes.
Practice
A storage engineer says the cluster has 8 TiB of space. Which unit is being used?
Choose one answer.
TiB is the symbol for tebibytes, a binary unit based on powers of two. Terabytes use the symbol TB and are slightly smaller, while gigabytes and petabytes are different orders of magnitude.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “tibibytes”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.