Terabyte (TB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000 gigabytes (10¹² bytes), the capacity of a typical modern hard drive.

1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (exactly).

1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

About the terabyte

Tera comes from the SI prefix for 10 to the twelfth, so a terabyte is one million million bytes. Computer memory is binary, so the prefixes were once used for powers of two, which caused confusion. IUPAC proposed binary prefixes such as kibi, mebi and gibi in 1995, and the IEC adopted them in December 1998 and published the standard in January 1999. The tebibyte is the binary counterpart, about 9 percent larger than the terabyte.

Hitachi introduced the first one-terabyte consumer hard drive in 2007. For scale, one terabyte is about 20 standard Blu-ray discs or 213 DVDs. The mismatch shows at this size: a drive sold as 1 TB may be reported as about 931 GB, because Windows uses the historic binary convention. macOS and iOS did the same until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iOS 10, then switched to powers of 10.

Sources: Wikipedia: Terabyte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples

Terabyte conversion chart

1 terabyte expressed in every other digital storage unit:

Unit1 terabyte
Bytes1,000,000,000,000
Kilobytes1,000,000,000
Megabytes1,000,000
Gigabytes1,000
Bits8,000,000,000,000
Petabytes0.001
Kibibytes976,562,500
Mebibytes953,674.3164
Gibibytes931.3225746
Tebibytes0.9094947018
Kilobits8,000,000,000
Megabits8,000,000
Gigabits8,000
Exabytes0.000001
Zettabytes1×10⁻⁹
Yottabytes1×10⁻¹²
Pebibytes0.0008881784197
Exbibytes8.67361738×10⁻⁷
Terabits8
Kibibits7,812,500,000
Mebibits7,629,394.531
Gibibits7,450.580597
Nibbles2,000,000,000,000

More Computing units

All Computing units

Browse all digital storage units.