Storage, in things you can picture
How much is 1 TB? And 2 TB?
A terabyte in photos, songs, documents and hours of video — and a practical way to work out how much space you actually need.
“A terabyte” means nothing to most people. It is a number that helps whoever is selling drives, not the person trying to work out whether it is enough.
So here is the plain version: a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, and a gigabyte is roughly three hundred photos from your phone. That is still abstract. The table is better.
A terabyte, in real things
| What | In 1 TB | In 2 TB |
|---|---|---|
| Photos taken on a phone (3 MB each) | 341,000 | 683,000 |
| DSLR photos, JPEG (8 MB) | 128,000 | 256,000 |
| RAW photos, the format photographers shoot (30 MB) | 34,000 | 68,000 |
| Songs as MP3 (9.6 MB) | 107,000 | 213,000 |
| PDF documents (0.5 MB) | 2,048,000 | 4,096,000 |
| Video in high definition (1080p) | 142 hours | 285 hours |
| Video in 4K | 45 hours | 90 hours |
| Full 256 GB phones | about 4 | about 8 |
The practical way to work out what you need
Do not add up everything you might one day upload. Look at what you have right now, in two places:
- Your phone. Open the settings and find the storage screen: it tells you how many gigabytes your photos and videos take. A 256 GB phone that is half full is 128 GB.
- Your computer. The documents folder and the pictures folder are almost always where the weight is.
Add the two together and double it. Doubling is not over-caution: it is the room you will need over the next few years, because photos keep arriving and phone cameras keep producing bigger files.
When 1 TB is enough, and when it isn't
1 TB will last you years if what you keep is mostly photos, documents, music and the occasional short video. Three hundred and forty-one thousand photos is more than most people take in a lifetime: at a thousand photos a year it would take three centuries to fill.
Look at 2 TB if you shoot video, especially in 4K. There the maths turns quickly: forty-five hours sounds like plenty until you notice it is under two hours a month for two years. The same goes for shooting RAW — thirty-four thousand files feels endless, but a wedding is two thousand frames and a busy shoot eats hundreds at a time.
Something almost nobody mentions
Storage is not petrol: it does not get used up. Files you upload stay there, and if you delete one the space comes back. So the right question is not “how much will I need forever” but “how much do I have now, and how fast does it grow”. If you do not know, the two-minute check above answers it.