How Big Is a Terabyte?

A bit is the smallest piece of information a computer can record.

It means that an electrical signal is on (1) or off (0).

A byte is 8 bits and has 256 possible combinations.

One byte is required to record the capital letter A from your keyboard (or any other single character.)

Bits and Bytes

A Terabyte is one trillion bytes.* In order to help picture what one trillion

looks like, let’s imagine that one byte is one dollar.

We’ll start with a $100 bill for our demo (100 bytes.)

Envisioning a Terabyte

*Actually, it’s 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, but close enough.

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000.

Ten Kilobytes would be equal to about ten paragraphs of text.

Ten Kilobytes = 10,000 Bytes

Believe it or not, this next little pile is one million dollars (100 packets of $10,000).

1 Megabyte could hold the equivalent of a small book.

One Megabyte = 1,000,000 Bytes

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable.

100 Megabytes might hold a couple ofvolumes of encyclopedias.

100 Megabytes = 100,000,000 Bytes

And one BILLION dollars—now we're really getting somewhere.

1 Gigabyte could hold the contents of about 10 yards of books on a shelf.

One Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 Bytes

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you $1 trillion

dollars...

One Terabyte =1,000,000,000,000 Bytes

And notice those pallets are double stacked.

One Terabyte =1,000,000,000,000 Bytes

3.6 million 300KB images 300 hours of good quality video 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica Ten Terabytes could hold the printed

collection of the entire Library of Congress. That's a lot of data.

One Terabyte Could Hold:

1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte 1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte 1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte 1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte 1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte 1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte 1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte 1024 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte 1024 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte

What Comes After Terabyte?

20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text. 500 billion pages of standard printed text.

One Petabyte Could Hold:

All of the words ever spoken by mankind.

One Exabyte Could Hold:

The entire World Wide Web. It would take approximately 11 trillion years

to download a Yottabyte file from the Internet using high-power broadband.

One Yottabyte Could Hold: