Digital Storage Made Easy: KB, MB, GB, and TB Explained
When it comes to digital storage, we all know that having enough is good, having some to spare is better, and having all we need is best. We also know that we can fit more smaller-sized files in a space than larger-sized ones. Most of us have a basic grasp of smallest-to-largest. But it gets confusing sometimes when we combine bits and bytes with the kilos, megas, gigas, and teras. When we finish up, you’ll have a better idea of how to think about these terms in everyday life.
Starting Small: The Bit
A bit is the smallest unit of digital information, in the form of a 0 or a 1. You can think of it like a light switch with 1 being “on” and 0 being “off.” Another way to think of it is 1 is “open”, meaning electricity can flow, and 0 is “closed,” meaning electricity cannot flow. A bit is the building block for everything else digital, and that’s why we start with bits.
A Step Up: The Byte
Eight bits make a byte. You can think of one byte as the sequence of 1s and 0s that will represent one letter or one numeral on the screen. A short text message would take only a few bytes or kilobytes, and some of that would depend on how many emojis you used. 😀
Quick Note
Space is measured in multiples of bytes, and speed is measured in multiples of bits. So, when we look at speed, we’re measuring Kilobits (Kbps) per second, Megabits (Mbps) per second, and Gigabits (Gbps) per second. But, when we’re measuring file sizes and storage capacity, we’re measuring kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), and terabytes (TB). Note the difference between the upper case and lower case “B,” that’s how you can tell the difference.
Growing Bigger: Kilobyte and Megabyte
Here’s where binary math changes things. As much as we’d love to say that a KB is 1,000 bytes, we’re in binary math now. As a result, our thousand becomes 1,024. Therefore, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. One kilobyte is about the length of a paragraph of text in a simple text file. However, that same paragraph of text in a word processing document might be as much as 10 – 15 kilobytes. Formatting in a document, even the formatting that tells the program “This is a document,” takes up space. The little things like margins and paragraphs consume space, and then when you start adding things like colored fonts and numbered lists, you’re adding even more to the size. By comparison, one minute of music in a compressed format would be about 1 MB.
Everyday Use Sizes: Gigabyte
Now we’re getting to today’s usage. 1 GB, or gigabyte, is 1024 MB. It’s about what it takes to store a short sitcom episode. A smartphone with 128 GB of storage can hold thousands of songs or photos. Your storage on your computer, tablet, phone, or external storage devices is measured in GB. Your Internet usage is also measured in data sizes, rather than data throughput speeds. That’s why your limit is in Gigabytes rather than Gigabits.
However, when you go to purchase some storage-related gear, you might notice that the multiplication is in 1,000, rather than 1,024. Also, if you buy a 1 TB hard drive, Windows will show the storage space in GB – and it won’t be 1,000 GB. Manufacturers are trying to keep the math simple for us decimal-heads, so they’re labeling a 1 TB drive as something that has 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. But that many bytes is about 931 GB, due to that binary math of 1024.
Huge Storage: Terabyte
Well, I say huge, but it’s really not that big anymore. It’s about 1024 GB in reality, but see the paragraph above for why “not really.” 1 TB of storage will hold about 250,000 songs or 500 hours of HD video – it’s a substantial amount of storage. Modern external drives can hold anywhere between 1-4 TB.
Our data has changed a lot in a short period of time. I had to get a new hard drive because my 512 GB hard drive was getting full — just with software! I store all my files on external devices to keep my hard drive clean, but today’s photo processing programs are really big.
Why It Matters
If you only use your devices for surfing the web, it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference to you how much storage you have, until you run out of storage because you have too many photos. When you need an external storage device, or when you go to buy a computer or your next phone, it can help to have an understanding of how these numbers come into play.
If you use cloud storage services, now you have some inkling of what you’re getting. You can also gauge just how much off-site storage you need based on what you need to store. You can do a better job of price comparison when you know what the numbers mean. If one service is offering 1 TB of storage, and another is offering 1,000 GB of storage, you know now to ask, “Is that a real TB, or is that a decimal-based TB?”
Beyond the Terabyte: What’s Next?
It’s so easy to look at our current use and say, “Yeah, a Terabyte should do me fine.” However, in 2000, we bought our first family computer with a whopping 8 GB of hard drive space. I couldn’t imagine ever filling that up. Then I got my first digital camera, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Even so, while it’s possible that my children and grandchildren may have larger-than-terabyte hard drives as a matter of course, I probably won’t. Still, let’s look at what comes next.
A petabyte (PB) is about 1,000 Terabytes. You’ll see these drives in big data centers and streaming services. Exabytes are multiples of about 1,000 petabytes, and that’s about the entire Internet’s traffic in a day – today. Beyond that, we get to the Zettabyte, which is the estimation of the entire world’s digital data in existence, and a Yottabyte, which is a projection term for “what we expect to see in the future.” There are a couple of bigger numbers still, based on what scientists expect we will eventually see later on.
It’s probably true that these numbers aren’t going to become part of our daily vocabulary the way gigabyte is. What I wanted you to see with these numbers is how fast data is growing, and why storage, cloud services, and data management are such important subjects in technology today.
Your Turn
Think back to when you first started using technology. How much storage did your first device have? Fortunately, our storage capacity has been able to keep up with our voracious data appetites – so far.
Now that you know what comes after TB, how does your phone storage feel? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Just a quick note on the conventions I used throughout this piece. While there may be a scientifically agreed-upon convention as to what to capitalize and what not to, essentially, there are no hard and fast rules. The most important thing to remember is that B is bytes and b is bits, unless you spell the whole word.
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