1TB

1 TB, or one terabyte, is a unit of digital information equal to 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (10^12). In binary terms, a tebibyte (TiB) is 2^40 bytes, or about 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, so 1 TB is roughly 0.9095 TiB. Because storage manufacturers typically use decimal TB labeling while operating systems perform binary calculations, the capacity shown by a computer may appear smaller than the advertised TB.

In everyday use, 1 TB is a common capacity for consumer storage devices such as internal hard disk drives, solid-state drives, external USB drives, and cloud storage plans. It provides space for an operating system, applications, and a sizable collection of media and documents. The actual usable space after formatting is slightly less than the nominal capacity due to file system overhead and reserved space.

Understanding the distinction between decimal and binary measurements helps explain capacity reporting. The same drive labeled as 1 TB might be shown by an operating system as about 0.91 TiB, reflecting the difference between decimal and binary prefixes. This discrepancy is a frequent source of confusion for users.

Historically, terabyte usage grew with the expansion of digital storage capacity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To reduce confusion between decimal and binary units, the IEC introduced prefixes such as kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, and tebibyte for binary multiples. Despite this, many consumer products continue to use the TB label, while some software and technical documentation adopt the more precise binary prefixes.