Terabytes to Yottabytes (TB to YB)

1 terabyte equals 1×10⁻¹² yottabytes exactly.

1 terabyte = 1×10⁻¹² yottabytes

How to convert terabytes to yottabytes

To convert terabytes to yottabytes, multiply the number of terabytes by 1×10⁻¹². This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply yottabytes by 1,000,000,000,000.

yottabytes = terabytes × 1×10⁻¹²

Example: 10 terabytes = 1×10⁻¹¹ yottabytes.

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)

ComputingCurrent unit

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

Yottabyte (YB)

ComputingCurrent unit

10²⁴ bytes. Yotta was the largest SI prefix until ronna and quetta were added in 2022.

Yotta stands for the eighth power of 1,000 and was adopted in 1991, so a yottabyte is 10^24 bytes, or 1,000 zettabytes. It stood at the top of the SI prefix list until 2022, when the BIPM added ronna (10^27) and quetta (10^30), and the byte forms, ronnabyte and quettabyte, followed. The symbol is YB.

No storage system or traffic measure approaches this size. Global IP traffic in 2016 was only around 1.2 zettabytes a year, about one-thousandth of a yottabyte, so the unit has mostly served in forecasts and illustrations rather than measurement.

The binary yobibyte (YiB) is 2^80 bytes, which is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes and about 20.9 percent more than a yottabyte. IEC standards define byte multiples up to this level, and a gap that wide is why the decimal and binary names are worth keeping apart.

1 yottabyte = 1×10²⁴ bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Byte; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; Wikipedia: Zettabyte Era

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.