Kilobyte

The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as a multiplication factor of 1000 (10³); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. The internationally recommended unit symbol for the kilobyte is kB.

In some areas of information technology, particularly in reference to random-access memory capacity, kilobyte instead typically refers to 1024 (2¹⁰) bytes. This arises from the prevalence of sizes that are powers of two in modern digital memory architectures, coupled with the coincidence that 2¹⁰ differs from 10³ by less than 2.5%. A kibibyte is 1024 bytes.