Terabyte

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Multiples of bytes
SI decimal prefixes Binary
usage		 IEC binary prefixes
Name
(Symbol)		 Value Name
(Symbol)		 Value
kilobyte (kB) 103 210 kibibyte (KiB) 210
megabyte (MB) 106 220 mebibyte (MiB) 220
gigabyte (GB) 109 230 gibibyte (GiB) 230
terabyte (TB) 1012 240 tebibyte (TiB) 240
petabyte (PB) 1015 250 pebibyte (PiB) 250
exabyte (EB) 1018 260 exbibyte (EiB) 260
zettabyte (ZB) 1021 270 zebibyte (ZiB) 270
yottabyte (YB) 1024 280 yobibyte (YiB) 280
See also: Multiples of bits · Orders of magnitude of data

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 is one terabyte is one trillion (short scale) bytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB.

1 TB = 1000000000000bytes = 1012bytes = 1000gigabytes.

A related unit, the tebibyte (TiB), using a binary prefix, is the anologous 4th power of 1024. One terabyte expressed using binary prefixes is about 0.910 tebibytes, or 931 gibibytes.

Contents

History [edit]

The first hard disk drives were created in the 1950s-1960s and were the size of a refrigerator [3][4] and had a capacity of a few megabytes. In 1982 the first IBM PC to have a hard disk, had a capacity of 5 megabytes [5]. The first single hard disks of terabyte size did not appear until the late 2000s. In 2012, a 1 terabyte disk drive is 2.5 inches wide and fits inside a laptop computer.

Costs [edit]

In 1991, consumer grade, 1 gigabyte (1/1000 TB) disk drives were available for $2699 and up[9], and two years later prices for this capacity had dropped to $1499[10]. By 1995, 1 GB drives could be purchased for $849.[8]

  • 2007 1 terabyte hard disk $370
  • 2010 2 terabyte hard disk $200
  • 2012 4 terabyte hard disk $450 (Hitachi, largest available in consumer market), 1 terabyte hard disk $100, 16 gigabyte USB flash drive $10
  • 2013 4 terabyte hard disk $179, 3 terabyte HD $129, 2 terabyte HD $100, 1 terabyte HD $80

Note: Dollars are USD and are not adjusted for inflation

Illustrative usage examples [edit]

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 April 2011, the Library has collected about 235 terabytes of data" and that it adds about 5 terabytes per month.[11]
  • Online databases – Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 TB of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.[12]
  • Computer hardware – Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte hard disk drive in 2007.[13]
  • Historical Internet traffic – In 1993, total Internet traffic amounted to approximately 100 TB for the year.[14] As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated Internet traffic at 160 TB/s (which, assuming to be statistically constant, comes to 5 zettabytes for the year).[15] In other words, the amount of Internet used per second in 2008 exceeded all of the Internet used in 1993.
  • Social networks – As of May 2009, Yahoo! Groups had "40 terabytes of data to index".[16]
  • Video – Released in 2009, the 3D animated film Monsters vs. Aliens used 100 TB of storage during development.[17]
  • Usenet messages – In October 2000, the Deja News Usenet archive had stored over 500 million Usenet messages which used 1.5 TB of storage.[18]
  • Encyclopedia – Wikipedia's January 2010 raw data uses a 5.87 terabyte dump.[19]
  • Climate science – In 2010, the German Climate Computing 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.[20]
  • Audio – One terabyte of audio recorded at CD quality will contain around 2,000 hours of audio. Additionally, one terabyte of compressed audio recorded at 128 kB/s will contain about 17,000 hours of audio.
  • The first 20 years worth of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope has amassed more than 45 terabytes of data.[21]
  • The IBM computer Watson, against which Jeopardy! contestants competed in February 2011, has 16 terabytes of RAM.[22]

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ a b "Convert terabytes (TB) to tebibytes (TiB) | Category : bits and bytes | Unit Conversion Center". Conversioncenter.net. Retrieved 2013-04-14. 
  2. ^ Hitachi introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive
  3. ^ Seagate Powers Next Generation Of Computing With Three New Hard Drives, Including World's First 1.5-Terabyte Desktop PC And Half-Terabyte Notebook PC Hard Drives
  4. ^ http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release={01D0EF49-E149-410A-A173-F872D0E6C335}
  5. ^ "WD to launch 2TB hard drive this week". Electronista. Retrieved 2013-04-14. 
  6. ^ Murph, Darren (2009-01-26). "Western Digital's 2TB Caviar Green HDD on sale in Australia". Engadget.com. Retrieved 2013-04-14. 
  7. ^ http://storageconference.org/2010/Papers/MSST/Pease.pdf
  8. ^ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/09/swiss_penknife_ssd/
  9. ^ "The High and the Mighty," Macworld, July, 1991
  10. ^ "1- and 2-Gigabyte Hard Drives", MacUser, July, 1993
  11. ^ How large is the Library's archive?, Web Archiving FAQs, accessed 7 April 2011.
  12. ^ "Ancestry.com Adds U.S. Census Records". CBS News. 2006-06-22. 
  13. ^ "Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive". PC World. 2007-01-07. Retrieved 2008-09-15. 
  14. ^ Swanson, Bret (2007-10-03). "Discovery Institute's Technology Blog: An exabyte here, an exabyte there". disco-tech. Retrieved 2013-04-14. 
  15. ^ White, Bobby (2008-06-16). "Cisco Projects Growth To Swell for Online Video". The Wall Street Journal. 
  16. ^ "Yahoo! Groups Blog". 2009-05-09. 
  17. ^ 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." 
  18. ^ "Usenet Sale: Sounds to Silence?". 2000-10-25. Retrieved 2009-10-13. "It's loaded with 500 million postings .... [and has] ballooned to over 1.5 terabytes" 
  19. ^ "Data dumps - Meta". Meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2013-04-14. 
  20. ^ [1][dead link]
  21. ^ "NASA - NASA - The Hubble Story". Nasa.gov. 2010-04-29. Retrieved 2013-04-14. 
  22. ^ [2][dead link]
Base units
Related units
Traditional bit units
Traditional byte units
IEC bit units
IEC byte units
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