How much is a terabyte?
A terabyte (TB) is 1,000 gigabytes, though your computer will probably show it as about 931 GB. Right now the cheapest way to buy storage is $17.96 per TB, on a desktop external hard drive. A plain 1 TB hard drive costs about $19.00, and a 1 TB SSD about $45.99.
Prices below come from the retailers PriceSniff tracks and update on their own.
What a terabyte costs by drive type
Bigger drives almost always cost less per terabyte, so each card shows the best rate on a new drive of 1 TB or more. Hard drives are the cheapest way to store a lot of data. SSDs cost more per TB but are much faster.
Watching for a sale? See the SSD price trend and hard drive price trend.
Want every drive in a class, cheapest first? See the price per TB rankings.
How many GB is a terabyte?
A terabyte is 1,000 GB. That's the decimal definition drive makers use, and macOS uses it too.
Windows counts in binary, where one "GB" is really 1,024 × 1,024 × 1,024 bytes (a gibibyte, or GiB). By that count, a 1 TB drive holds about 931 GiB, and Windows labels it "931 GB". No space is missing. It's the same number of bytes measured with a bigger unit. In binary units, 1 TiB is 1,024 GiB.
| Drive size (as sold) | Gigabytes (decimal) | What Windows shows |
|---|---|---|
| 500 GB | 500 GB | ~466 GB |
| 1 TB | 1,000 GB | ~931 GB |
| 2 TB | 2,000 GB | ~1.82 TB (1,863 GB) |
| 4 TB | 4,000 GB | ~3.64 TB (3,725 GB) |
| 8 TB | 8,000 GB | ~7.28 TB (7,451 GB) |
(Brand-new drives also lose a few GB to formatting and, on a system drive, to recovery partitions.)
What fits in a terabyte
Roughly, 1 TB holds:
- About 250,000 phone photos (at ~4 MB each).
- About 200,000 songs as MP3s, or around 2,000 hours of CD-quality lossless audio (FLAC).
- About 70 hours of 4K video shot on a phone, or several hundred hours of 1080p streaming-quality video.
- 10 to 20 modern AAA games, since most big titles take 50 to 100 GB each.
- More documents, spreadsheets and e-books than you're likely to own. Text is tiny next to photos and video.
Most drives hold a mix, and photos and video take up most of the space. An hour of 4K footage takes more room than years of documents, so if you shoot a lot of video, 1 TB fills faster than these numbers suggest.
Is the cheapest $/TB always the best buy?
Not always. The lowest price per terabyte on a marketplace is often a listing you wouldn't want. Here's what we leave out of the rankings, and why.
Used, refurbished and pulled drives. A drive pulled from a server may have run for years. Its price says nothing about how long it has left. We only rank drives listed as new.
SAS server drives. They're cheap per TB, but they need a SAS controller, and a normal desktop motherboard doesn't have one. Plugged into a home PC, they won't show up. Enterprise SATA drives such as Seagate Exos and WD Gold do work in a home PC, so they stay in.
Fake-capacity listings. Some cheap "2 TB" flash drives and SSDs hold far less than the label says and quietly corrupt files once they're full. If a price is far below what a class normally sells for, we drop it.
Lots and multi-packs. A listing that offers several sizes at one price usually means the smallest size. A 2-pack priced as one drive skews the math.
Routers and NAS boxes. An old Wi-Fi router or network drive with a disk inside can sell cheap per TB, but you're paying for the device, not the drive. Apple's Time Capsule and WD's My Cloud are examples. We only rank drives.
Our filters catch most of these, but marketplace titles are messy. If a deal looks too good, read the listing carefully: check the condition, the interface (SATA vs SAS), and whether a known brand makes it. You can still see the excluded drives through each class's "Browse all" link on the price per TB rankings.
Frequently asked questions
How much is a terabyte?
A terabyte is 1,000 GB of storage (about 931 GB as Windows counts it). The cheapest new storage today works out to $17.96 per TB on a desktop external hard drive. A single 1 TB hard drive costs about $19.00.
How much does a terabyte cost?
It depends on the drive type. Hard drives cost from $17.96 per TB and SSDs from $28.75 per TB, based on the best rate on new drives of 1 TB and up. Smaller drives cost more per TB. The cheapest 1 TB hard drive is about $19.00, and the cheapest 1 TB SSD about $45.99.
How much is a TB of storage?
If you only need 1 TB, a new hard drive runs about $19.00 and an SSD about $45.99. If you need lots of storage, buy a bigger drive. The best rate today is $17.96 per TB, and the cheapest drive in each class is ranked on our price per TB page.
How much is a terabyte of storage in an external drive?
A new desktop external hard drive works out to $17.96 per TB at today's best rate (2 TB for $35.92). Smaller portable drives that run off USB power cost $27.25 per TB.
How much is 2 TB?
A new 2 TB hard drive costs about $35.92, and a 2 TB SSD about $139.00.
How much is 4 TB?
A new 4 TB hard drive costs about $84.99, and a 4 TB SSD about $115.00.
How many GB is a terabyte?
1,000 GB. Windows counts in binary units, so it shows a 1 TB drive as about 931 GB. The bytes are all there; they're just counted in 1,024s instead of 1,000s.
Why does 1 TB cost so much more on an SSD than on a hard drive?
A hard drive stores data on spinning platters, which are cheap to make in huge capacities. An SSD stores it on flash chips, which cost more per TB but are much faster. NVMe SSDs especially load games and files many times quicker than a hard drive. External and portable drives add an enclosure and USB connection on top of the drive itself.