Sep 01 2008
Computer Storage Terms Explained
Computers are a digital devices that store information as ones and zeroes or bits. 8 bits is equal to 1 byte. The equations are shown in the chart.
| 1,024 bytes | 1 kilobyte |
| 1,024 kilobytes | 1 megabyte |
| 1,024 megabytes | 1 gigabyte |
| 1,024 gigabytes | 1 terabyte |
| 1,024 terabytes | 1 petabyte |
| 1,024 petabytes | 1 exabyte |
| 1,024 exabytes | 1 zettabyte |
| 1,024 zettabytes | 1 yottabyte |
One thing to pay strict attention to is the abbreviations that are used. For example, MB equals megabyte whereas Mb equals megabit. To explain this further, let’s use a common cable Internet download speed of 6 Mbps. This is 6 megabits per second which would equal 6 times 1,024 divided by 8 or 768 KBps (kilobytes per second).
What has really confused people is the capacities of hard drives. Hard drives are denoted by gigabytes. The manufacturers actually use a formula of 1,000 to denote size instead of the correct value of 1,024. So that new 250 GB hard drive you just bought is actually 232 GB as reported by the OS.
