What Is Terabytes Per Second (TBps)?

Don't let the name of this one scare you, as it is very terrifically tremendous. So what is a terabyte? Well, it's 1,000 gigabytes. So that's much storage. Yet how much is it when you're talking about megabits? A terabyte per second is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes per second. That's a whole lot of bytes, or, if you want to get technical about it, 1,000 petabytes per second! So next time you decide whether your internet connection can handle streaming all three seasons of House of Cards at once (spoiler: it won't), just remember that this number equals 1,000 gigabytes per second. To understand how much data we're talking about here, let's put it in terms of other things you might be familiar with, for example. A terabyte per second equals 1,000 gigabytes or 1 billion gigabytes. That's many bytes. A terabyte per second equals the amount of data used by 300 people surfing the internet for 30 minutes each day for one year. We've seen many data in our day. Yet we still need to figure out how to quantify it. The age of the terabyte is upon us, and it's time to get used to it. As a relatively new phenomenon, data handling in terabytes per second has been rising recently. Throughout the last decade, data transference storage capabilities were usually measured either in gigabytes or megabytes. New technologies can transfer data and storage into a realm to which the terabyte now applies. We all know that one terabyte is equal to 1 million gigabytes or 1 billion megabytes; we also know that one terabyte can store about 74 days' worth of HD video, which is pretty impressive! So when it comes to what constitutes "terabyte-ness," we're still scratching our heads.