Terabyte

A terabyte is 2 to the 40th power, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

It can be estimated as 10 to the 12th power, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes and precedes the petabyte unit of measurement. While today's consumer hard drives are typically measured in gigabytes, Web servers and file servers may have several terabytes of space. A single 500GB hard drive can also be called a half-terabyte drive.

The prefix "tera" comes from the Greek word meaning "monster." So, if you have a 500GB hard drive, you could say you have half a monsterbyte of disk space. If nothing else, it sure sounds impressive.

For a list of all the different units of measurements, view this Help Center article.

Abbreviation: TB

Published: 2003