Terabyte

What Does Terabyte Mean?

A terabyte (TB) is a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, using the SI standard.

Techopedia Explains Terabyte

The prefix “tera” of terabyte is part of the SI or International System of Units, and means 10¹². Hard disk manufacturers label their products in SI, which may confuse some people in the IT field. The ISO, IEEE and the IEC all recommend using the unit tebibyte, which is more accurate for the measure of bytes signifying 1,024⁴ bytes.

Two interpretations can be made using the two standards:

Using SI, one terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes or 10¹² bytes
Using traditional binary measurement, one terabyte is equivalent to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, that’s 2^40, or 1024^4, bytes, also equivalent to 1 tebibyte (TiB)

Related Reading

Understanding Bits, Bytes and Their Multiples

Margaret Rouse

Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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