When choosing a new computer we come across terms such as "300GB hard drive" and "500MB download", and to the uninitiated, this can be somewhat disconcerting. Data in a computer is represented in a series of bits. Since the birth of computers, bits have been the language that control the processes that take place inside that mysterious black box called your computer. In this article, we look at the very language that your computer uses to do its work.
Bit
A bit is simply a 1 or a 0. A true or a false. It is the most basic unit of data in a computer. It's like the dots and dashes in Morse code for a computer. It's also called machine language.
Byte
In computer science a byte is a unit of measurement of information storage, that equals '8 bits', can be used to represent letters and numbers. For example, the number 01000001 is 8 bits long, and represents the letter A in ASCII.
kB
A kB is a unit of data that equals 1024 bytes. This is because 8 bytes cannot contribute into 1000.
MB
Megabyte is 1024kB squared, 10242
GB
A gigabyte is a unit of data storage worth a billion bytes meaning either exactly 1 billion bytes (10243) or approximately 1.07 billion bytes. More often than not in advertising, Gigabytes are presented as 1 billion bytes and not 10243 (read the fine print in your adverts!). This explains why a freshly formatted 500GB hard drive shows up at a 450GB one instead. Not too long ago many people were discussing storage in Megabytes. These days, storage has become so cheap that having Gigabytes is considered the norm.
TB
A terabyte is 10244 and is defined as about one trillion bytes, or 1024 gigabytes. Data centres such as those operated by Google handle thousands if not millions of terabytes of data each day. As storage becomes cheaper and faster, terabytes are becoming a commonly heard term.
PB
A petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes (10245). Microsoft stores on 900 servers a total of approximately 14 petabytes.
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