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Free Computer Skills Course: Digital Storage Terminology.
Learn about Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes (KB), Megabytes (MB), Gigabytes (GB), Terabytes (TB).
Transcript:
Let's continue our discussion of digital storage terminology. Digital storage uses the binary system, where everything is saved as ones and zeros.
The word that’s used to describe these ones and zeros is a BIT; it’s short for ‘binary digit’ and it is the smallest unit of data in a computer.
These Bits - these ones and zeroes - are used to store all kinds of information, from text documents, to the digital photos that you take, to the sounds that come out of your speakers. To store this information, we use a whole bunch of bits together. The number of bits we have determines how much data we can store.
Now for our next term: If you take 8 bits - 8 of these ones and zeroes - and you put them together, that’s called a Byte. It sounds like a mouthful of food, but it’s spelled with a ‘y’ and it refers to 8 bits put together. You can think of one byte as the amount of space it takes to store one single letter or symbol in a text document. If you wrote a paragraph with 500 characters, that would require about 500 bytes of storage space.
That brings us to our next term. If you take 1000 bytes and put them together, that’s called a Kilobyte, often abbreviated as “kB” (lowercase k, uppercase B) or just "k". Now, I will mention just once, that there are actually 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, and that’s because digital storage uses the binary system and everything is expressed in powers of two. That said, it’s ok to just think of a kilobyte as 1,000 bytes, similar to how a kilogram is 1,000 grams or a kilometer is 1,000 meters. One Kilobyte is enough space to hold about a third of a page of text. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 5.25” floppy disk was a popular storage medium, it could hold 360 kilobytes of information.
So now, what’s it called when you have 1,000 kilobytes? 1,000 kilobytes is called a Megabyte, abbreviated as capital “MB”. One megabyte is enough space to hold about one book, one photo, or one minute of music. Keep in mind those are approximations and could vary widely based on quality and type of encoding. The 3.5" floppy disk, introduced in the 1980s, could hold 1.44MB of data.
Now you may be wondering, what’s it called if you have 1,000 megabytes? 1,000 megabytes is called a Gigabyte, abbreviated as capital "GB". A gigabyte is enough space to hold about 1,000 books, or 1,000 photos, or 16 hours of music. By the mid 1990s, a 1GB hard drive could be purchased for a couple hundred dollars. Nowadays, 1GB is considered very little storage, and you could buy a 1GB flash drive, SD card or Micro SD card for just a couple dollars, if you could find one at all.
So now, what's it called when you have 1,000 gigabytes? 1,000 gigabytes is called a Terabyte, abbreviated as capital “TB”. A terabyte is enough space to hold about 1,000,000, which is about 80 school libraries, 1,000,000 photos, or two years of continuous music. Nowadays, 1TB of storage is readily available, as a hard drive, solid state drive, or even SD or Micro SD card.
So, to recap, we talked about how there are 8 bits in one byte, 1,000 bytes in 1 kilobyte, 1,000 kilobytes in 1 megabyte, 1,000 megabytes in 1 gigabyte, and 1,000 gigabytes in 1 terabyte. That's enough to know for everyday usage, but for those of you who are curious, after terabyte comes petabyte, then exabyte, then zettabyte, the yottabyte.
Thanks for watching! I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and that you have a better understanding of digital storage terminology.