Divide gigabytes by 1000 (decimal) or 1024 (binary)
Terabyte to gigabyte is a clean factor of 1000 under SI decimal: 1 TB equals 10¹² bytes, 1 GB equals 10⁹ bytes, the ratio is 10³. The binary equivalents are tebibyte (TiB, 2⁴⁰ bytes) and gibibyte (GiB, 2³⁰ bytes), also at ratio 1024. ConvertBuddy uses the decimal convention to match storage product labels and cloud billing. The 2.4% gap between 1000 and 1024 grows visible at terabyte scale: a '1 TB' drive shows roughly 931 'GB' free in Windows due to the unit-label mismatch.
The terabyte sits one step above the gigabyte in the storage hierarchy. One terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes under the decimal SI convention used by hard drive manufacturers, NAS vendors, and cloud-storage providers.
Convert from GB to TB when planning multi-drive backup arrays, sizing cloud-archive tiers, or comparing total media library size against drive options. The binary alternative (1 TiB = 1024 GiB) shows up in some operating system tools, but rarely on price tags or mobile-plan invoices.
As consumer storage scaled past one terabyte in the late 2000s, the unit became routine on external drives, server arrays, and high-capacity SSDs.
A 20,000-photo iPhone library at 3 MB each plus 200 video clips at 200 MB each runs about 100 GB — comfortably inside a single 1 TB drive but worth converting when deciding between 1 TB and 2 TB tiers.
Pro cameras shoot 50-150 MB RAW files. A 30-shoot year fills 100-300 GB. Convert to GB when comparing whether a 1 TB or 2 TB external drive serves you for several years.
Drives sold by TB capacity; usable space after RAID and filesystem overhead given in GB by the NAS UI. Convert to verify expected usable capacity matches the marketing-label TB total.
Backblaze, Backblaze B2, and similar services price storage in dollars per TB-month. Per-file or per-folder volumes given in GB. Convert to estimate the monthly bill before committing.
Database row counts and average row sizes give projection in MB or GB. Disk allocations come in TB increments on cloud providers. Convert to map projected growth onto disk-tier upgrade timing.
Divide GB by 1000. So 1000 GB = 1 TB, 500 GB = 0.5 TB, 2500 GB = 2.5 TB. This matches the decimal SI convention used by storage manufacturers and cloud providers.
Under the binary IEC convention, 1 TiB equals 1024 GiB. Under the modern decimal SI convention used by drive vendors and cloud providers, 1 TB equals 1000 GB. Different conventions for different contexts — always check which the source uses.
Exactly 2000 GB by the label, but Windows will display it as roughly 1862 GB free due to the decimal-vs-binary unit-label mismatch. macOS and most Linux file managers display the full 2000 GB.
Windows reports storage in binary gibibytes but labels them 'GB'. The 1 trillion bytes from the drive label divided by 2³⁰ bytes per gibibyte equals roughly 931, hence the 931 'GB' display. The drive holds the full advertised capacity — just measured against a different unit definition.
Roughly 250,000 photos at 4 MB each, or 500 hours of 1080p video, or 200,000 songs at 5 MB each, or 1000 hours of compressed HD podcast audio. Storage hardware capacity has scaled faster than most users' content production.
No, but they are close. 1 TB = 10¹² bytes (1 trillion). 1 TiB = 2⁴⁰ bytes ≈ 1.0995 trillion. The 9.95% difference grows from the same root cause as the GB-vs-GiB confusion.
Petabyte (PB) = 1000 TB, exabyte (EB) = 1000 PB, zettabyte (ZB) = 1000 EB, yottabyte (YB) = 1000 ZB. Consumer storage rarely exceeds tens of TB. Enterprise and hyperscale data centers operate at PB and EB scale.
Modern external HDDs and SSDs have very low annualized failure rates, but no single drive is safe. The 3-2-1 backup rule recommends three copies of data, on two different storage types, with one copy offsite. Convert TB capacities accordingly when planning redundancy.