Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
Also see Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, and all that.
Kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, and exbi are binary prefix multipliers that, in 1998, were approved as a standard by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in an effort to eliminate the confusion that sometimes occurs between decimal (power-of-10) and binary (power-of-2) numeration terms.
At present, the prefix multipliers kilo- (k or K), mega- (M), giga- (G), tera- (T), peta- (P),
and exa- (E) are ambiguous. In most of the physical sciences, and when describing quantities of
objects generally, these multipliers refer to powers of 10. However, when used to define data
quantity in terms of bytes, they
refer to powers of 2. The following table denotes the most often-used prefixes and their
meanings.
| Prefix | Symbol(s) | Power of 10 | Power of 2 |
| kilo- | k or K ** | 103 | 210 |
| mega- | M | 106 | 220 |
| giga- | G | 109 | 230 |
| tera- | T | 1012 | 240 |
| peta- | P | 1015 | 250 |
| exa- | E | 1018 * | 260 |
| * Not generally used to express data speed | |||
| ** k = 103 and K = 210 | |||
The power-of-10 multipliers and the power-of-2 multipliers for a given word prefix are almost,
but not quite, the same. For example, the power-of-10 definition of kilo- (k) refers to 1,000,
while the power-of-2 definition (K) refers to 1,024. As if this is not confusing enough, when
referring to a data speed of one kilobit per second (1 kbps), analysts generally mean 1,000 bits
per second (103 bps), but when talking about one kilobyte (1 KB) of data storage, they
usually mean 1,024 bytes (210 B). This prevailing confusion could be eliminated (some
computer scientists believe) by adopting special prefixes referring to the binary quantities. The
proposed scheme is as follows.
| Full technical name |
Proposed prefix |
Proposed symbol |
Numeric multiplier |
| kilobinary | kibi- | Ki | 210 |
| megabinary | mebi- | Mi | 220 |
| gigabinary | gibi- | Gi | 230 |
| terabinary | tebi- | Ti | 240 |
| petabinary | pebi- | Pi | 250 |
| exabinary | exbi- | Ei | 260 |
In scenarios such as the one mentioned above, if the new binary prefixes are used, it should be easy to know whether an engineer is talking or writing about the decimal or binary multiplier. We will know that one kilobit per second (1 kbps) means 1,000 bps, and one kibibyte (1 KiB) means 1,024 bytes, for example.
As of this writing, the binary prefix multipliers have not yet come into general use.
Pronunciation: Based on a suggestion from NIST, "the first syllable of the name of the binary-multiple prefix should be pronounced in the same way as the first syllable of the name of the corresponding International Standard (SI) prefix, and the second syllable should be pronounced as 'bee.'" Thus, "kibi" would be pronounced "KIH-bee"; "mebi" would be "MEH-bee", and so forth.