What is a Terabyte or TB?

A Terabyte (TB) is a measure of computer storage capacity 2 to the 40th power or approximately a trillion bytes. A terabyte is more precisely defined as 1,024 gigabytes (GB).

Talking about data storage in Information Technology, we often come across various confusing terms like megabyte, gigabyte, or terabyte. A computer's memory is like any other physical storage device that stores information of all sizes temporarily or permanently, and its storage capacity is measured in the units of bytes.

A computer processor is made of various circuits, each of which has one of the two work states - ON or OFF. In terms of electronic devices' memory, the circuits' these two work situations are represented by BInary digiTS (Bits) – 0 and 1, where 1 means ON and 0 means OFF. Each digit makes one bit, and a collection of eight bits makes a byte. One byte can have 2⁸ distinct positions.

Unit Conversions

1 Byte = 8 Bits

1 Kilobyte = 1024 Bytes or 10³ Bytes

1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes or 10⁶ Bytes

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes or 10⁹ Bytes

1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes or 10¹² Bytes

1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes or 10¹⁵ Bytes

1 Exabyte = 1024 Petabytes or 10¹⁸ Bytes

1 Zetta = 1024 Exabytes or 10²¹ Bytes

1 Yottabyte = 1024 Zettabytes or 10²⁴ Bytes

It's almost a decade ago when terabytes started gaining popularity in the IT industry after the consumer hard drives reached the capacity of 1 TB. Until then, the hard drives stored data in gigabytes, a thousand of which makes one terabyte. Normally, half a terabyte storage in a general-purpose computer is good enough for efficient functioning, while one terabyte works well in corporate computer networks. Terabytes are also used in bandwidth or speed measurement, i.e., the amount of data transferred in a specific timeframe.

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