A kibibyte is 1,024 bytes, and a Kilobyte is 1,000 bytes. This naming convention hasn’t always been the case. This article will explore what has changed and why it matters.
Before discussing the differences between Kibibyte and Kilobyte, I will need to define both a bit and a byte.
What is a bit?
The bit is an abbreviation of a binary digit, and it can either be 1 or 0. we can model a bit by imagining a single light bulb connected to a light switch. When the light bulb is off and emitting no light, it has the value 0. Now switch the light on, and you have changed the bulb state. The lightbulb is now on, and its value has changed to 1.
On its own, a bit isn’t practical, but start grouping them together, and the bit becomes the building blocks of the digital age. One of the most common groupings of bits is a byte.
What is a byte?
A byte is a grouping of 8 bits allowing each byte to represent 256 different values enough to represent the most common characters used in the English language. One example of this is the ASCII standard.
A byte and its multiples such as Kibibytes and Kilobytes measure computer memory or storage capacity.
Why the difference between Kibibyte and Kilobyte matters
When I started learning computers back in the 1980s, the word Kibibyte didn’t exist, and the Kilobyte was 1,024 bits. That changed during the early 21st century when the standard institutes got involved.
Firstly be deciding that the Kilo, whatever it was measuring, be it a meter, gram, or byte, will always be a 1,000, which from a consistency point makes sense. However, in computing, due to the binary nature of digital data, it continues to have multiple values at 1,024, which is why the IEEE published a new standard in 2002. Introduced Kibibyte to represent a thousand binary bytes or 1,024.
The difference of 24 bytes Kibibyte and Kilobyte might not seem like much, but that is a difference of 24 bytes in Kibibyte. So why don’t we look at the difference between a Mebibyte and a Megabyte?
A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes, but what about the Mebibyte? A Mebibyte is calculated by multiplying 1,024 by 1,024, which is 1,048,576 bytes. That is a difference of 48,576 bytes.
Conclusion
As a general rule of thumb, computer memory is measured in Kibibyte and its related multiples such as Mebibyte, Gibibyte and Tebibyte. While the capacity of storage devices such as Solid State Drives (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD).