Terabytes to Bits (TB to bit)
1 terabyte equals 8,000,000,000,000 bits exactly.
How to convert terabytes to bits
To convert terabytes to bits, multiply the number of terabytes by 8,000,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits by 1.25×10⁻¹³.
bits = terabytes × 8,000,000,000,000
Example: 10 terabytes = 80,000,000,000,000 bits.
Decimal prefixes (kB, MB, GB) are powers of 1,000; binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB) are powers of 1,024. Storage makers use decimal; Windows reports binary but labels it GB.
About these units
Terabyte (TB)
1,000 gigabytes (10¹² bytes), the capacity of a typical modern hard drive.
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.
1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Terabyte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
Bit (bit)
The smallest unit of digital information: a single 0 or 1. Eight bits make a byte.
Bit is short for binary digit, and the word was coined by John W. Tukey. He shortened the phrase in a Bell Labs memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon first used it in print in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication and credited Tukey with the word. The idea predates the name: Ralph Hartley proposed a logarithmic measure of information in 1928, and punched cards, invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon in 1732 and developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, already stored one bit per hole position.
A bit holds one of two values, written 0 or 1, and everything digital is built from them. Eight bits make a byte, so a bit is one eighth of a byte. Symbols for the unit are not settled: the IEC standard uses bit, while IEEE 1541-2002 recommends a lowercase b, with uppercase B reserved for the byte. The difference matters because internet speeds and file sizes are quoted in different units.
1 bit = 0.125 bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Bit; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
Related conversions
- Bits to terabytes (reverse)
- Terabytes to bytes
- Terabytes to kilobytes
- Terabytes to megabytes
- Terabytes to gigabytes
- Terabytes to petabytes
- Terabytes to kibibytes
- Terabytes to mebibytes
- Terabytes to gibibytes
- Terabytes to tebibytes
- Terabytes to kilobits
- Terabytes to megabits
- Terabytes to gigabits
- Bytes to bits
- Kilobytes to bits
- Megabytes to bits
- Gigabytes to bits
- Petabytes to bits
- Kibibytes to bits
- Mebibytes to bits
- Gibibytes to bits
- Tebibytes to bits
- Kilobits to bits
- Megabits to bits
- Gigabits to bits
See all digital storage units.