A terabyte (derived from the prefix tera- and commonly abbreviated TB) is a measurement term for data storage capacity. The value of a terabyte is based upon a decimal radix (base 10) and is defined as one trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes.
The number of bytes in a terabyte is sometimes stated to be approximately 1.0995 x 1012. This difference arises from a conflict between the long standing tradition of using binary prefixes and base 2 in the computer world, and the more popular and intuitive decimal (SI) standard adopted widely in the industry.
According to the SI standard and current usage, a terabyte (TB) contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10004 or 1012 bytes.
According to traditional and binary arithmetic, a terabyte contained 1,099,511,627,776 bytes = 10244 or 240 bytes. Ambiguity can be avoided by use of the standardized term for this quantity, the tebibyte.
The capacities of computer storage devices are traditionally advertised using their SI standard values.
