What is a Terabyte?

By | 2008-01-14

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.

Author: dwirch

Derek Wirch is a seasoned IT professional with an impressive career dating back to 1986. He brings a wealth of knowledge and hands-on experience that is invaluable to those embarking on their journey in the tech industry.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.