What is a Terabyte?
A terabyte is a unit of measurement (in the modern metric system (SI)) for computer storage. Terabytes are usually only used to reference extraordinarily large volumes of data such as those stored on a research library server. Abbreviated TB, a terabyte is equal to approximately one trillion bytes. The exact equivalent of one terabyte (corresponding to the binary prefixes) is exactly 1, 099, 511, 627, 776 bytes, 1,048,576 megabytes and 1,024 gigabytes of data. The binary name for terabytes is tebibyte, but terabyte is more commonly used. Tig is industry vernacular for terabyte.
A terabyte (TB) is 1,024 gigabytes (GB), an allocation of data storage capacity applied most often to hard disk drives. Hard disk drives are essential to computer systems, as they store the operating system, programs, files and data necessary to make the computer work. In the late 1980s, the average home computer system had a single hard drive with a capacity of about 20 megabytes (MB). By the mid 1990s, average capacity increased to about 80 MBs. Just a few years later, operating systems alone required more room than this, while several hundred megabytes represented an average storage capacity. As of 2005, computer buyers think in terms of hundreds of gigabytes, and this is already giving way to even greater storage. With the advent of graphic, video and music files, home studios, paint and photo programs, and advanced desktop publishing applications, storage seems to be as wise an investment as real estate. The cost of hard disks has dropped dramatically over the years and continues
Do you need a terabyte? Remember when you got your last computer? A few gigabytes seemed like scads of storage space. But along came a new operating system, a bunch of MP3 music files, and a bunch of videos. Now that hard drive is creaking under the load. Enter the Terabyte… One terabyte is a trillion bytes (characters) which is also 1000 gigabytes. Or if you prefer, 1 TB = 1000 GB. So how much storage is that, really? Let’s do some comparisons… 1 GB of memory is the equivalent of 500,000 typewritten pages, or about one pickup truck of books. So you could say that a terabyte is a thousand librarians driving Ford F150’s stacked with literature. Or in digital terms… the biggest iPod Classic stores 160GB, or about 40,000 songs. Six of those iPods would hold almost one terabyte, enough space to store a quarter-million songs. If you had a shiny new 1-terabtye hard drive, you could stash 300 feature length films, or 40,000 faxes on it. But you’d need 20 of those 1 TB drives to hold the
