Measurement unit conversion: terabyte

›› Measurement unit: terabyte

Full name: terabyte

Plural form: terabytes

Symbol: TB

Category type: computer data storage

Scale factor: 1099511627776

Valid units must be of the computer data storage type.
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›› Definition: Terabyte

A terabyte (commonly abbreviated TB) is a measurement term for data storage capacity.

The number of bytes in a terabyte is sometimes stated to be approximately 1.0995 × 10¹². This difference arises from a conflict between the long standing tradition of using binary prefixes and base 2 in the computer world, and the more popular decimal (SI) standard adopted widely both within and outside of the computer industry. Standards organizations such as IEC, IEEE and ISO recommend to use the alternative term tebibyte (TiB) to signify the traditional measure of 1024⁴ bytes, or 1024 gibibytes.

The capacities of computer storage devices are typically advertised using their SI standard values, but the capacities reported by software operating systems uses the binary values. A NTFS formatted terabyte hard drive shows 931 gigabytes of free, usable storage space under Windows XP.

Most users prefer to calculate unit conversions using the binary definition, so this site uses non-SI units.

›› Sample conversions: terabyte

›› Common misspellings of terabyte

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