How Much Fits in 1 TB? Storage Estimates

To estimate how many items fit, you divide the capacity by the average size of one item. Using common rough figures — about 4 MB per smartphone photo, 5 MB per high-quality song, 50 MB per minute of 1080p video and 1 MB per ebook — one decimal terabyte (1,000,000 MB) holds roughly 250,000 photos, or 200,000 songs, or 20,000 minutes (about 330 hours) of 1080p video, or a million ebooks.

Mix your content and the numbers scale down proportionally. If half your drive is video and half is photos, you simply split the capacity and apply each average to its share. The method is always the same: total bytes divided by bytes per item.

Those figures are gut-check averages, not guarantees. A RAW photo from a mirrorless camera can be 30 to 50 MB — ten times a compressed JPEG. 4K video runs several times larger than 1080p, often 200 to 350 MB per minute, while a heavily compressed streaming clip is smaller. Lossless audio in FLAC is several times bigger than a 320 kbps MP3.

Always match the assumption to your actual files. The estimate is only as good as the per-item size you feed it, so if your photos average 8 MB rather than 4, simply halve the photo count. A tool that shows its assumptions on screen makes this easy to adjust.

A '1 TB' drive never gives you a full terabyte to fill. First, the decimal-versus-binary gap means it shows as about 931 GiB in many operating systems. Second, the file system itself reserves space for its index and metadata, and some drives keep a hidden area for wear-levelling or recovery. In practice, plan for roughly 90% of the labelled capacity being usable.

Leave a margin, too. Mechanical drives slow down and SSDs wear faster when they are packed close to full, so keeping around 10% free is good for both speed and longevity.

Averages beat guesses, so it helps to carry a few. A high-quality 12-megapixel phone JPEG lands around 4–6 MB; a 24-megapixel raw file from a mirrorless camera is 25–30 MB. A four-minute track at 256 kbps AAC is 7.7 MB, because 256 000 bits per second across 240 seconds divided by eight is what it is. An ebook is 1–2 MB, and a PDF scan of a book can be fifty times that.

Video is set by bitrate, not by resolution alone. An hour of 1080p at 8 Mbps is 3.6 GB; an hour of 4K HEVC at 20 Mbps is 9 GB. Divide a terabyte by each of those and you get roughly 200 000 phone photos, 35 000 raw files, 130 000 songs, 277 hours of 1080p or 111 hours of 4K. The ratios are what matter — one hour of 4K costs as much as eighteen hundred photographs.

The bitrate a camera records at is nothing like the bitrate a streaming service delivers. A phone shooting 4K60 in HEVC writes 60–100 Mbps, three to five times what a streaming platform sends for the same resolution, because the service has time to encode slowly and you do not. A single hour of that footage can eat 45 GB — five times the estimate above.

The same spread applies everywhere: raw photographs from a 45-megapixel body are twice the size assumed above, lossless FLAC is five to eight times a 256 kbps AAC file, and a folder of design assets is mostly a handful of enormous files rather than many small ones. The reliable method is to measure a representative folder you already own, divide to get your own average, and use that instead of a published figure.