Terabyte


The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera represents the fourth power of 1000, and means 1012 in the International System of Units, and therefore one terabyte is one trillion bytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB.
A related unit, the tebibyte, using a binary prefix, is equal to 10244 bytes. One terabyte is about 0.9095 TiB. Despite the longstanding use of TB by hard drive and tape drive manufacturers to mean 1000 billion bytes, following international standards, the terabyte is used in some computer operating systems, primarily Microsoft Windows, to denote bytes for disk drive capacity.

History

The prefix tera was defined for the International System of Units in 1960. It is derived from the Greek word τέρας teras, meaning "monster"., but it has also connotation to the Greek word tetra, meaning "four", in analogy to the subsequent prefix names being correlated to magnitude of the decimal exponent.
Usage of terabyte in information technology products includes:
Examples of the use of terabyte to describe data sizes in different fields are: