How much is a terabyte?
Storage prices are updating — check back shortly, or see the full Best $/TB rankings for live numbers.
For the full ranked list — every priced drive, cheapest first, in each class — see the Best $/TB hub.
What fits in a terabyte
A terabyte (TB) is 1,000 gigabytes (GB) — or, if a device reports "binary" terabytes like most operating systems, closer to 1,024 GB, which is why a "1 TB" drive often shows up as roughly 931 GB in your file manager. Either way, it's a lot of room. Roughly, 1 TB holds:
- ~250,000 photos from a modern smartphone camera (about 4 MB each).
- ~200,000 songs as MP3s, or roughly 500 hours of lossless audio.
- ~250 hours of 4K video, or well over 1,000 hours at 1080p.
- 15-20 modern AAA games installed at once — current titles routinely run 40-100 GB each.
- Hundreds of thousands of documents, spreadsheets, and e-books — text is tiny compared to photos and video, so a terabyte of pure documents is effectively uncountable.
In practice, most people mix these — photos and video dominate a typical drive's usage, since a single hour of 4K footage can outweigh a lifetime of documents. If your library is mostly photos and video, 1 TB fills up faster than the numbers above suggest once you're storing more than one media type at once.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the same 1 TB cost so differently by drive type?
You're paying for speed and durability, not just capacity. Internal hard drives are the cheapest way to store a terabyte because they're mechanical and bulk-manufactured. External drives add a similar mechanism plus an enclosure and cable, which costs more per TB. NVMe SSDs use flash memory with no moving parts and are dramatically faster — often 10-20x — which is reflected in a much higher $/TB rate.
See live prices, every tracked drive, and $/TB trend charts on the Best $/TB hub.