terabyte

American  

[ter-uh-bahyt] / ˈtɛr əˌbaɪt /

noun

Computers.

terabytes plural

1. 2 40 (1,099,511,627,776) bytes; 1024 gigabytes.

2. (loosely) 10 12 or one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) bytes; 1000 gigabytes. TB, TByte.

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terabyte British  

/ ˈtɛrəˌbaɪt /

noun

1. computing 10 ¹² or 2 ⁴⁰ bytes

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terabyte Scientific  

/ tĕr′ə-bīt′ /

1. A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 gigabytes (2 ⁴⁰ bytes).

2. One trillion bytes.

3. See Note at megabyte

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• terabytes
  plural

Etymology

Origin of terabyte

First recorded in 1980–85; tera- + byte

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

terabyte terabytes

Affected hardware included the MacBook Pro with 1 terabyte of storage, which rose to $1,999 from $1,699 on its US store.

From BBC ● Jun. 25, 2026

Western Digital and Seagate currently price their hard drives at around $14.30 to $14.90 per terabyte.

From Barron's ● Jun. 15, 2026

Calculating this four-phonon scattering required a parallel computing strategy, essentially utilizing a computing cluster with one terabyte of memory.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 28, 2023

Specifically, an expansion card about the size of half of a business card simply plugs into the back of the entertainment console and expands storage up to 1 terabyte.

From Washington Times ● Nov. 25, 2023

So, to support a terabyte, multiply by five, which gives $5 million per year for a supported terabyte of data.

From Library of Congress Workshop on Etexts by Library of Congress

The project produced terabytes of genetic data and relied on Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Computing resources to reconstruct evolutionary relationships stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 14, 2026

Beyond cellphone pings placing Rinderknecht in the general area where the fire began, Haney and his experts argue that authorities have few specifics from the terabytes of evidence.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 4, 2026

However Wada said that move directly led to their retrieval of 24 terabytes of data from the Moscow lab in January and April 2019.

From BBC ● Apr. 30, 2026

Each of Majestic’s new servers is capable of scaling up to 128 terabytes of high-speed memory, enough to smoothly run models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters, the company says.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 28, 2026

For twenty years, something less than three terabytes would be required.

From Library of Congress Workshop on Etexts by Library of Congress