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A terabyte (TB) is a unit of measurement in computers and similar electronic devices. One terabyte holds 1000 gigabytes (GB) or a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) bytes, and 1000 terabytes make one petabyte. Large organizations use terabytes of storage to hold massive amounts of data. People at home might use terabytes for backups. An external hard drive can be several terabytes.

The prefix tera is derived from the Greek word for monster. It would take 728,177 floppy disks or 1,498 CDs to hold 1 TB of information. It has been estimated that a single TB could hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and 10 Terabytes could hold the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.

A terabyte can hold the same amount of data as nearly a million floppy disks, or 1,498 CDs. Having said that, the first 1 TB external hard drive didn’t even exist until 2007.