Terabyte
A terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore 1 terabyte is 1000000000000bytes, or 1 trillion (short scale) bytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB or Tbyte.
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| SI decimal prefixes | IEC binary prefixes | ||||
| Name (Symbol) |
Standard SI |
Binary usage |
Ratio SI/Binary |
Name (Symbol) |
Value |
| kilobyte (kB) | 103 | 210 | 0.9766 | kibibyte (KiB) | 210 |
| megabyte (MB) | 106 | 220 | 0.9537 | mebibyte (MiB) | 220 |
| gigabyte (GB) | 109 | 230 | 0.9313 | gibibyte (GiB) | 230 |
| terabyte (TB) | 1012 | 240 | 0.9095 | tebibyte (TiB) | 240 |
| petabyte (PB) | 1015 | 250 | 0.8882 | pebibyte (PiB) | 250 |
| exabyte (EB) | 1018 | 260 | 0.8674 | exbibyte (EiB) | 260 |
| zettabyte (ZB) | 1021 | 270 | 0.8470 | zebibyte (ZiB) | 270 |
| yottabyte (YB) | 1024 | 280 | 0.8272 | yobibyte (YiB) | 280 |
| See also: Multiples of bits · Orders of magnitude of data | |||||
Contents |
[edit] Usage
Disk drive sizes are always designated in SI units by manufacturers. However, a possible confusion arises from this definition with the long-standing tradition in some fields of information technology and the computer industry of using binary prefix interpretations for memory sizes. Standards organizations such as International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recommend to use the alternative term tebibyte to signify the traditional measure of 10244 bytes, or 1024 gibibytes, leading to the following definitions:
- In standard SI usage, 1 terabyte (TB) equals 1000000000000bytes = 10004, or 1012 bytes.
- Using the traditional binary interpretation, a terabyte would be 1099511627776bytes = 10244 = 240 bytes = 1 tebibyte (TiB).
The capacities of computer storage devices are typically specified using their the standard SI meaning of unit prefixes, but many operating systems and applications report in binary-based units. Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) reports decimal units.
[edit] 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 has claimed that "As of February 2010, the Library has collected almost 160 terabytes of data".[1]
- Online data bases - Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 TB of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.[2]
- Computer hardware - Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte hard disk drive in 2007.[3]
- Internet traffic - In 1993, total Internet traffic amounted to approx. 100 TB for the year.[4] As of June 2008[update], Cisco Systems estimated Internet traffic at 160 TB/s (which assuming to be statistically constant comes to 5 zettabytes for the year).[5]
- Social networks - As of May 2009, Yahoo! Groups had "40 terabytes of data to index" [6]
- Video - Released in 2009, the 3D animated film Monsters vs. Aliens used 100 TB of storage during development.[7]
- Usenet messages - In October 2000, the Deja News Usenet archive had stored over 500 million Usenet messages which used 1.5 TB of storage[8]
- Encyclopedic Use - Wikipedia's January, 2010 raw data uses a 5.87 Terabyte dump.[9]
- Climate Science - In 2010, Germany's Climate Research Centre (DKRZ) was generating 10,000 TB of data per year, from a supercomputer with a 20 TB memory and 7,000 TB disk space.[10]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "How large is the Library's archive?". 2007-05-26. http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/faq.html.
- ^ "Ancestry.com Adds U.S. Census Records". 2006-06-22. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/22/tech/main1740956.shtml.
- ^ "Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive". PC World. 2007-01-07. http://www.pcworld.com/article/128400/hitachi_introduces_1terabyte_hard_drive.html. Retrieved 2008-09-15.
- ^ http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/10/an_exabyte_here_an_exabyte_the.php
- ^ White, Bobby (2008-06-16). "Cisco Projects Growth To Swell for Online Video". The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121358372172676391.html.
- ^ "Yahoo! Groups Blog". 2009-05-09. http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/2009/03/17/groups-search-update/.
- ^ IRENE THAM (2009-04-08). "Taking a monster shit; Massive computer power was needed to create the 3-D movie Monsters Vs Aliens.". The Straits Times. "The 3-D movie used up close to 100 terabytes of disk space and more than 40 million hours of rendering."
- ^ "Usenet Sale: Sounds to Silence?". 2000-10-25. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/10/39622. Retrieved 2009-10-13. "It's loaded with 500 million postings .... [and has] ballooned to over 1.5 terabytes"
- ^ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps
- ^ http://www.dkrz.de/pdf/poster/ISC10-Poster_Web/ISC10_HardwareDKRZ.pdf
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