The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera represents the fourth power of 1000, and means 1012 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore one terabyte is one trillion (short scale) bytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB.
Definition
1 TB = 1000000000000bytes = 1012bytes = 1000gigabytes.
A related unit, the tebibyte (TiB), using a binary prefix, is equal to 10244 bytes. One terabyte is about 0.9095 TiB. Despite the introduction of these standardized binary prefixes, the terabyte is still also commonly used in some computer operating systems, primarily Microsoft Windows, to denote 1099511627776 (10244 or 240) bytes for disk drive capacity.
One thousand terabytes (1000 TB) is equal to one petabyte (1 PB).
History
Early if not first usage of terabyte in selected products:
- Supercomputer mass storage: ca. 1992 (decimal usage)
- Supercomputer memory: 2005 (binary usage)
- Hard disk drives: 2007 (decimal usage)
- Tape drives: 2010 (decimal usage)
- Motherboard memory: 2011 (binary usage)
Illustrative usage examples
Examples of the use of terabyte to describe data sizes in different fields are:
- Library data: The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team claims that as of March 2014 "the Library has collected about 525 terabytes of web archive data" and that it adds about 5 terabytes per month.
- Online databases: Ancestry.com claims approximately 600Â TB of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.
- The CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) released 300 terabytes of data to the global science community in April 2016 from its latest science run on the Large Hadron Collider. It Involved just the last science run of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, 1 of 4 large science instruments at the LHC facility.
- Computer hardware: Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte hard disk drive in 2007.
- Historical Internet traffic: In 1993, total Internet traffic amounted to approximately 100Â TB for the year. As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated Internet traffic at 160Â TB/s (which, assuming to be statistically constant, comes to 5 zettabytes for the year). In other words, the amount of Internet traffic per second in 2008 exceeded all of the Internet traffic in 1993.
- Social networks: As of May 2009, Yahoo! Groups had "40 terabytes of data to index".
- Video: Released in 2009, the 3D animated film Monsters vs. Aliens used 100Â TB of storage during development.
- Usenet: In October 2000, the Deja News Usenet archive had stored over 500 million Usenet messages which used 1.5Â TB of storage.
- Encyclopedia: In January 2010, the database of Wikipedia consists of a 5.87 terabyte SQL dataset.
- Climate science: In 2010, the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) was generating 10000Â TB of data per year, from a supercomputer with a 20Â TB memory and 7000Â TB disk space.
- Audio: One terabyte of audio recorded at CD quality contains approx. 2000 hours of audio. Additionally, one terabyte of compressed audio recorded at 128 kbit/s contains approx. 17,000 hours of audio.
- The Hubble Space Telescope has collected more than 45 terabytes of data in its first 20 years of observations.
- The IBM computer Watson, against which Jeopardy! contestants competed in February 2011, has 16 terabytes of RAM.
- 1 terabyte of data would require about 1428 CD-ROMs , 212 DVDs, or 40 single-layer Blu-ray Discs.
See also
- Orders of magnitude (data)
References
