2015/03/16
Let's start with a list of prefixes:
kilo = meaning 1,000. (one thousand)
mega = meaning 1,000,000. (one million)
giga = meaning 1,000,000,000 (one billion)
tera = meaning 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion)
So: GB is short for Gigabyte. MB is short for Megabyte. With a 200 Gigabyte (GB) hard drive, you have 200 billion bytes of data storage. If you had a 200 Megabyte hard drive, you have 200 million bytes of data storage.
A byte (which stands for "BinarY digiT Eight.") is a way to measure data storage. The first computers could only send 8 bits of data at a time, so it was natural to start writing code in sets of 8. Eight bits of data then became known as a byte.
And here's how the scale progresses:
To give you an idea what that means in real stuff:
A
Megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes or 1,024 Kilobytes
- 873 pages of plaintext (1,200 characters)
- 4 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters)
Gigabyte (GB)
A Gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (230) bytes. 1,024 Megabytes, or 1,048,576 Kilobytes.
- 894,784 pages of plaintext (1,200 characters)
- 4,473 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters)
- 640 web pages (with 1.6MB average file size)
- 341 digital pictures (with 3MB average file size)
- 256 MP3 audio files (with 4MB average file size)
- 1 650MB CD
Terabyte (TB)
A Terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 (240) bytes, 1,024 Gigabytes, or 1,048,576 Megabytes.
- 916,259,689 pages of plaintext (1,200 characters)
- 4,581,298 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters)
- 655,360 web pages (with 1.6MB average file size)
- 349,525 digital pictures (with 3MB average file size)
- 262,144 MP3 audio files (with 4MB average file size)
- 1,613 650MB CD's
- 233 4.38GB DVD's
- 40 25GB Blu-ray discs
(more on other sizes here: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chspace.htm )
And more:
A couple of FYI's:
- All of the hard drives in the world combined do not add up to even one Zettabyte.
- No computer in the world has yet to achieve a yottabyte of data storage.