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A gig-a-what

by Dean on January 16th, 2006

A gig-a-what

In today’s high-tech world there are a lot of terms and crazy lingo that is thrown around. Let me elaborate on the terms used for measuring data storage. First think about milk and how it is measured. In school you get a little carton of milk it used to be a pint. It takes two pints to make a quart. It takes 4 quarts to make a gallon.

Now let’s apply this concept to data. First you start with a bit this would be the most basic breakdown. A bit is not even equal to 1 piece of information.

It takes 8 bits to make a byte which would be equal to 1 lower case letter using the command line.

Next is the Kilobyte (KB). It takes 1024 bytes to make a Kilobyte.

Now there is 1024 KB that makes a Megabyte (MB).

There is 1024 MB that make up a Gigabyte (GB)

The last one I will cover is that there is 1024 GB that make a Terabyte. This would be equal to 1,099,511,627,776 characters using the command line.

So when you have a 120 GB hard drive that would be equal to 128,849,018,880 characters using the command line.

This is the simplest breakdown there is on this subject, and believe it or not it gets real complicated. Some times I wonder if people are just making up stuff as they go. There is a lot of information on the Internet about this subject.

You will also find different computer companies have different standards depending on a few schools of calculations. The whole measuring data storage gets fairly complicated, but you do not really need to know all of that.

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POSTED IN: Intro To PC's, Random Notes