Convert Gigabytes to Terabytes

1,000 GB = 1 TB (With a Caveat)

In the decimal (SI) system used by drive manufacturers and this converter, 1 terabyte is exactly 1,000 gigabytes. But your operating system might disagree. Windows reports drive capacity using binary math, where 1 TiB (tebibyte) = 1,024 GiB (gibibytes). This discrepancy is why a "1 TB" hard drive shows up as about 931 GB in Windows.

The full breakdown:

This is not fraud by the manufacturer. They are using the SI definition (powers of 1,000). Your OS is using powers of 1,024. macOS switched to decimal reporting in 2009, so Macs show the same number as the label. Windows and Linux still show binary by default.

Cloud Storage Plans in Perspective

Cloud storage tiers are marketed in GB and TB. Here is what those numbers actually hold:

• 100 GB: about 50,000 photos at 2 MB each, or 25 hours of HD video
• 200 GB: roughly one full laptop backup
• 1 TB: about 500,000 photos, or 250 hours of HD video, or 6.5 million text documents
• 2 TB: a comfortable family backup including years of photos and videos

Google Drive, iCloud, and OneDrive all use the decimal TB. When they say "2 TB plan," they mean 2,000 GB, and your device will confirm close to that number (minus a small amount for file system overhead).

Data Center Scale

At enterprise scale, the numbers jump to petabytes (1 PB = 1,000 TB). Netflix's content library, encoded in hundreds of formats for different devices, is estimated at several petabytes. Google processes roughly 20 PB of data per day. A large enterprise might have 500 TB to several PB in their data warehouse. At these scales, the GB-to-TB conversion becomes the small-change math of storage planning.

The Naming Mess

The binary vs. decimal naming confusion has a formal solution from the IEC: use "gibibyte" (GiB) for 1,024^3 bytes and "gigabyte" (GB) for 1,000^3 bytes. In practice, almost nobody outside of technical documentation uses gibibyte in conversation. The converter offers both GB/TB (decimal) and GiB/TiB (binary) units, so you can convert in whichever system you need.