terabyte
Pluralterabytes
- 1A unit of digital information equal to one trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes.
If a gigabyte were a single thick book, a terabyte would be a thousand-book library.
The research team generated nearly a terabyte of raw sensor data each day.
Modern external drives now store several terabytes at a fairly low price.
- 2A unit of digital information storage equal to 1,024 gigabytes (2⁴⁰ bytes), used informally in place of the formally distinct tebibyte.
Like a baker's dozen used in place of twelve: the familiar word carries a slightly larger amount than its strict definition.
The server array stores several terabytes of research data.
Each terabyte of this disk actually holds 1,024 gigabytes, not 1,000.
Note
Computing's habit of counting in powers of two shows in this sense: the terabyte becomes 2⁴⁰, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. That is nearly a tenth more than the decimal trillion, a gap large enough to matter when comparing storage figures. Where precision counts, the formal name is tebibyte, abbreviated TiB. Terabyte in this meaning is the casual shorthand, best avoided in technical writing.
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Origin
Formed from the prefix tera- combined with byte.