Terabyte

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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.

Multiples of bytes
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:

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:

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "How large is the Library's archive?". 2007-05-26. http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/faq.html. 
  2. ^ "Ancestry.com Adds U.S. Census Records". 2006-06-22. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/22/tech/main1740956.shtml. 
  3. ^ "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. 
  4. ^ http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/10/an_exabyte_here_an_exabyte_the.php
  5. ^ White, Bobby (2008-06-16). "Cisco Projects Growth To Swell for Online Video". The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121358372172676391.html. 
  6. ^ "Yahoo! Groups Blog". 2009-05-09. http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/2009/03/17/groups-search-update/. 
  7. ^ 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." 
  8. ^ "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" 
  9. ^ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps
  10. ^ http://www.dkrz.de/pdf/poster/ISC10-Poster_Web/ISC10_HardwareDKRZ.pdf
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