How Big Is 1 Terabyte (1TB)?

1TB

There’s only 1 of it, how big can that really be?

If you’ve ever looked into purchasing an external hard drive to backup your computer, you would have found that the smallest size available would be 1 Terabyte or more commonly known as 1TB. But how big is that really?

1TB is the same size as 1000GB which in turn is the same size as 1,000,000MB.

To put this is perspective, a 1-5 page PDF or word document is less than 0.2MB. That means a single 1TB hard drive can hold 5,000,000 word documents of 1-5 page length!

As an example, we have an eBook on the basics of Microsoft Excel which is 12 pages long and its file size is 0.4MB. That means if you had a 1TB hard drive filled with this Excel guide and printed them out double sided, you would have 2.5 million copies or 15 million pieces of paper! That means if you stacked all of these pieces of paper on top of one another, you would have a pile 750m tall which is even taller than the Eiffel Tower. In fact, it would be taller than 2 Eiffel Towers!

To use another example, the entirety of Wikipedia is 51GB. So you could hold just under 20 copies of Wikipedia on a 1TB hard-drive.

When printed off and bound into ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ sized volumes, Wikipedia would fill HEAPS of bookshelves as the image below shows. That’s a lot of knowledge! And too imagine, 19 FULL copies of Wikipedia would fit on a single 1TB hard drive.