Kilobyte

Kilobyte

Kilobyte: a unit of data measurement equal to 1000 bytes.

Kilobyte is the metric equivalent of the Kibibyte, using the power of ten instead of two,〖10〗^3 to be specific. Because of this it totals 1, 000 bytes instead of the metric amount.

It is defined not by the IEC binary standards of measurement, but by the SI metric standards and is denoted by the symbol KB.

Like the Kibibyte, it is the first multiple in the series, but in this case it is a multiple of 1000 instead of 1024, making it about 2.4% smaller than the Kibibyte.

This means when looking at the basic formula for each- 1000 for Kilo and 1024 for Kibi- the conversion can be seen as KiB= 1.024 KB.


It comes after the Byte, but before the Megabyte. Kilobytes are one of the more common data measurements, right alongside gigabytes.

This is because most plain text documents and graphics are in the KB range in terms of size.

A simple way of looking at it is that the base for both is the bit, followed by the byte which is 8 times the size of the bit.

After that, each metric measurement is 1000 times the previous term, and each binary unit is 1024 times the size of the previous unit. 

Note that the Kilobyte is on the metric scale, which is an SI standard of measurement.

Like other measuring units, it has a binary counterpart, which measures on the binary scale of powers of two, instead of the metric scale using multiples of ten. This binary counterpart is the Kibibyte.

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