Gigabit to Tebibyte

1 Gbps (gigabit) broadband delivers up to 125 MB/s, which is more than sufficient for most households. It supports dozens of simultaneous 4K streams, fast game downloads, and video conferencing with headroom to spare. The limiting factor is usually the Wi-Fi router (Wi-Fi 5 maxes out around 400–600 Mbps in practice) or the speed of the remote server you're downloading from.

10 Gbps networking is standard in data centers, server interconnects, and high-performance workstations doing large file transfers (video editing, database backups). It is increasingly available in prosumer home networking equipment. At 10 Gbps, a 1 TB file transfer takes about 13 minutes under ideal conditions.

One terabit equals 1,000 gigabits (SI). Terabit-per-second (Tbps) speeds are used in long-haul fiber optic cables and internet backbone infrastructure. A single transatlantic fiber cable typically carries hundreds of terabits per second across many multiplexed channels.

Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) delivers up to 3.5 Gbps theoretical, but typically 400–600 Mbps real-world on a single device. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) reaches 9.6 Gbps theoretical and 600–900 Mbps practical per device, with better multi-device handling via OFDMA. Wi-Fi 6E extends the same technology into the uncongested 6 GHz band, improving real-world speeds to 1–2 Gbps. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) pushes the theoretical maximum to 46 Gbps using 320 MHz channels and 4096-QAM, with real-world single-device speeds expected around 2–5 Gbps — the first Wi-Fi standard to reliably exceed gigabit in practice.

Modern data centers handle enormous simultaneous traffic between thousands of servers — cloud computing, video streaming, and AI training all require massive internal bandwidth. 100 Gbps links between switches are now standard; 400 Gbps is increasingly deployed for spine connections. At these speeds, a single link can move 50 GB of data per second, keeping pace with NVMe storage arrays and GPU memory transfer rates.

TB (terabyte) = 10¹² bytes = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (SI decimal). TiB (tebibyte) = 2⁴⁰ bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes (IEC binary). TiB is 9.95% larger. The practical consequence: a 1 TB hard drive (decimal) holds 0.9095 TiB. This 10% gap is the primary reason drive capacity appears lower in the OS than on the box.

ZFS and Btrfs are copy-on-write filesystems designed for TiB-scale pools with built-in features that traditional filesystems lack. ZFS supports inline deduplication — a 10 TiB pool with 40% duplicate data might show 6 TiB of logical usage but only consume 3.6 TiB physically. Btrfs offers transparent compression (zstd), where a 4 TiB dataset of compressible log files might occupy only 1–2 TiB on disk. Both support snapshots that initially consume zero extra space, growing only as data diverges. These features make "used space in TiB" surprisingly complex to report accurately.

Yes. Linux tools (df -h, lsblk) display storage in IEC binary units: KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB. df -h output showing "1.8T" for a 2 TB drive is reporting 1.8 TiB. Modern Linux distributions correctly label these as TiB in technical contexts. This is one of the areas where Linux is more technically precise than Windows or consumer storage labels.

RAID arrays lose capacity to redundancy: RAID 1 mirrors two drives (50% efficiency); RAID 5 loses one drive worth of capacity; RAID 6 loses two drives. A 4-drive RAID 5 array of 2 TB drives has 3 × 2 TB = 6 TB raw usable (decimal), ≈ 5.46 TiB, minus filesystem overhead. Enterprise storage also reserves space for spares, snapshots, and wear levelling, further reducing usable TiB.

No. A tebibyte (TiB) = 2⁴⁰ bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes — about 1.1 trillion bytes. Exactly one trillion bytes = 10¹² bytes = 1 terabyte (TB, decimal). The tebibyte is approximately 10% larger than a trillion bytes. "Terabyte" is often casually used to mean "1 trillion bytes"; "tebibyte" is the precise binary equivalent at 1,024 gibibytes.