Terabyte

Terabyte

Terabyte: a unit of data measurement equal to  bytes

Terabyte is the metric equivalent of the Tebibyte, using the power of ten instead of two, to be specific. Because of this it totals 1,000,000,000,000 bytes instead of the binary amount.

Instead of being defined by the IEC system of measurement, it is measured in metric terms according the SI standards, and is denoted by the symbol PB.

Like the Tebibyte, it is the fourth multiple in the series, but in this case it is a multiple of 1000 instead of 1024, making it about 10% smaller than the Tebibyte.

This means when looking at the basic formula for each-  for Tera and 1024 for Tebi- the conversion can be seen as TiB= 1.10 TB.

It comes after the Gigabyte, but before the Petabyte. Many HDD are coming out now that contain 1 or 2 TB worth of storage, and some workstations have upwards of 10 TB.

It can also be used to measure bandwidth usage over a given time. A simple way of looking at it is that the base for both is the bit, followed by the byte which is 8 times the size of the bit.

After that, each metric measurement is 1000 times the previous term, and each binary unit is 1024 times the size of the previous unit.

Note that the Terabyte is on the metric scale, which is an SI standard of measurement. Like other measuring units, it has a binary counterpart, which measures on the binary scale of powers of two, instead of the metric scale using multiples of ten. This binary counterpart is the Tebibyte.

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