Terra is a term used in the international SI system for weights and measures. It derived from the Greek word teras which means monster in English. Byte is a computer storage unit which is also called one of the smallest units which is the parent unit of the bit. Terabyte is used to specify the storage unit which is used to express 1 000 000 000 000 bytes.
TeraByte vs Bit vs Byte vs GigaByte vs PetaByte
Terabyte unit is popularly used to express disk or RAM sizes. There are also units called GigaByte and PetaByte which are related to the terabyte.1 TB can be equal to the different size units which are provided below.
1 TB = 1 000 000 000 000 bytes = 10^12 bytes 1 TB = 8 000 000 000 000 bits = 8x10^12 bits 1 TB = 1 000 GB (Gigabyte) 1 TB = 0.1 PB (Petabyte)
TB or Tb or TiB
A terabyte can be expressed as a shortcut with the TB. But there is a similar short-form Tb. They are different because uppercase B means byte where lowercase b means a bit. So Tb means Terabit which is 8 times lower than TB. TiB is another alternative for the expression of the terabyte. TiB is called Tebibyte which is equal to 1024^4 bytes. So 1 terabyte will be equal to 0.9095 TiB.
TeraByte Term Usage
A terabyte is used for a long time in the computing area. Here the list of usage area and date of the terabyte term.
- Optical Disk Storage uses terabytes from 1985.
- Supercomputer mass storage or disk uses from 1992.
- Supercomputer memory or RAM uses from 2005.
- Hard Disk Drives uses from 2007.
- Tape drives use from 2010.
- Motherboard memory uses from 2011.
- External Hard Disk Drive uses from 2017.
- USB Flash Disk uses from 2019.
How Can Be 1 TB Size?
TB is currently used a lot of different size specifications for different protocols, formats, etc. We will list different cases which are related to TB.
- iPhone and Samsung Galaxy smartphones provides 256 GB storage area which is roughly equal to 0.25 TB.
- Typical Laptop and PC comes with a 1-2 TB disk in general and can be upgraded up to 16 TB according to the situation.
- External hard drives can provide storage areas from 1 TB to 8 TB in general.
- An advanced server can provide 0.5 or 1 TB memory or RAM easily.
- Cloud Storage like Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive provides generally storage about 1-5 TB.
- Cloud VPS providers provide 1 TB disk for medium-level virtual systems.
- Cloud VPS providers provide 1-2 TB network traffic for a regular VPS.
