terabait

Terabait is a unit of information that represents 1,000,000,000,000 bits (10^12 bits). In English-language technical writing, the standard term for this quantity is terabit (Tb). The word terabait appears in some translations or non-English contexts and is not consistently used in formal standards. The prefix tera- denotes a trillion, and the lowercase b denotes bits, distinguishing it from bytes (B).

Conversions and relationships to other units can clarify the magnitude. One terabait equals 125,000,000,000 bytes, or about 125 gigabytes when using decimal byte definitions. In binary terms, this is roughly 116.4 gibibytes. In comparison to terabytes, 1 terabyte (10^12 bytes) equals 8 terabits, so a terabait is one-eighth of a terabyte. These relationships help align bit-based measurements with the more common byte-based storage capacities.

Usage context and standardization are important for interpretation. Terabits per second (Tbps) are commonly used to express network throughput and backbone bandwidth, whereas byte-based units (bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes) are A more common way to express data storage capacity. Because bandwidth and storage use different base units (bits versus bytes), care is needed when converting between them. While terabait is occasionally encountered, more precise and widely understood terminology favors terabit for data rate and terabyte for storage.