The number of bytes in a terabyte is sometimes stated to be approximately 1.0995 x 1012. This difference arises from a conflict between the long standing tradition of using binary prefixes and base 2 in the computer world, and the more popular decimal (SI) standard adopted widely both within and outside of the computer industry. Standards organizations such as IEC, IEEE and ISO recommend to use the alternative term tebibyte (TiB) to signify the traditional measure of 10244 bytes, or 1024 gibibytes, leading to the following definitions:
According to the SI standard usage, a terabyte (TB) contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10004 or 1012 bytes.
According to binary arithmetic, a tebibyte contains 1,099,511,627,776 bytes = 10244 or 240 bytes. Ambiguity can be reduced by avoiding the use of the term "terabyte" when the binary meaning is intended.
The capacities of computer storage devices are typically advertised using their SI standard values, but the capacities reported by software operating systems usually uses the binary values.[citation needed]
