Do you know your Bits and Bytes?

Bytes of data on a hard drive

Do you need a megabyte drive, or a terabyte drive? Storage is big numbers today, I explain the sizes of “bytes” to help.

Mitshk Blog

Previously published on mitshk.wordpress.com

Let’s start at the beginning:

You’ve typed in a single letter ‘a’, how much space does that need?

Bits

Computers work at the basic level with 0 or 1 – known as Base 2 or Binary.

Each of those numbers needs a ‘bit’ of space.

However, there’s no way that we can identify a letter with that. Instead each character is assigned a number code to identify it – which takes up to 8 Bits.

The answer to the question – 8 Bits or 1 Byte.

Bytes (and more)

1 Byte = a character

I’m pretty sure that we need a few characters to do anything, so measuring anything but the most basic of information is going to take a lot of Bytes.

Note: A character is the general term given to numbers, letters or symbols.

Just explaining this has taken 828 characters (including spaces), therefore large amounts of Bytes are needed.

Kilobyte

Next we jump to 1,000 – known as Kilo.

The second word, then explains what measurement it’s referring to, e.g. Kilogram. Of course, we’re talking about computer storage, a byte – so it becomes Kilobyte or Kb.

1 Kilobyte (Kb) = 1,000 Bytes

Large enough for many files, but not really much for data storage.

What’s nice is that each increase in size is now 1,000 times larger that the previous one – so we just add three zero’s.

Megabyte

Adding those three extra zero’s, we now get to million.

1 Megabyte (Mb) = 1,000 Kb or 1,000,000 bytes

For those that remember a floppy disc (3.5 inches) the average storage space was 1.44MB.

While this was the standard size for a few years, as programs got more complicated they needed to storage more information in the files, which meant larger files and more space needed.

Gigabyte

Increase a million by three zero’s gives us a billion.

1 Gigabyte (Gb) = 1,000 Mb or 1,000,000 Kb or 1,000,000,000 bytes

Files are still (generally) measured in either Kilobytes or Megabytes and when you have a few of those we need something that is large enough to handle it.

We now store images, especially videos which require a lot of information, so many of those types of files are into the Gigabyte range – upto the hundreds of Gigabytes.

Terabyte

Increase a billion by three zero’s gives us a trillion.

1 Terabyte (Tb) = 1,000 Gb or 1,000,000 Mb or 1,000,000,000 Kb or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Fortunately, so far, files don’t get into the terabyte territory, but we are storing more information digitally, so the size of our storage (drives) is now often available in terabytes.

Larger Sizes

As quickly as we moved from Kilobytes to Gigabytes it’s not going to be that long before we will need even more space.

You’ll be unsurprised that the names/numbers do already exist – and some drives do as well for companies that store that much information – however we don’t need these sizes (yet), but just for information here’s a couple:

Petabyte

1 Pb = 1,000 Tb or 1,000,000 Gb, 1,000,000,000 Mb

Exabyte

1 Eb = 1,000 Pb or 1,000,000 Tb or 1,000,000,000 Gb

Rounding the Numbers

Most of the world has standardised on the metric system – Base 10, which makes working with the numbers easier as it’s multiples of 10.

However, computers (remember) work in Binary which is Base 2, not as easy to work with.

A Kilobyte is actually 1024b, not 1,000b

While the sizes that I’ve given here are the acknowledged amounts, they aren’t the true sizes if you look at them.

Quick Guide

For those that just want the sizes:

1 Byte = 8 Bits or a character

1 Kilobyte (Kb) = 1,000 Bytes

1 Megabyte (Mb) = 1,000 Kb

1 Gigabyte (Gb) = 1,000 Mb or 1,000,000 Kb

1 Terabyte (Tb) = 1,000 Gb or 1,000,000 Mb

1 Petabyte (Pb) = 1,000 Tb or 1,000,000 Gb

More translations of popular ‘tech terms’ can be found on the Translator pages.

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