You should be able to…
- Define the terms bit, nibble, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte
- Understand that data needs to be converted into binary format to be processed by a Computer
This diagram below clearly shows you the relationship between the units of data you are expected to know about. Lets go on to look at these in a little more detail…
Bit, Nibble, Byte
A bit is the smallest unit of data that is represented on a computer and is shown as a single binary digit, either 0 or 1. A Nibble is 4 bits and a Byte is 8 bits, or 2 Nibbles.
Kilobyte
‘Kilo’ is the Greek word for ‘Thousand’. A Kilobyte is commonly referred to as being 1000 bytes. however It is actually 1024 bytes. A Kilobyte would be enough to store 1024 characters: This is shown visually below. Remember that each character (A) takes up a byte of storage (01000001).
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly 50 characters long $%!&()
This sentence is exactly
The following image is 15 Kilobytes or 15,000 bytes.
Megabyte
A Megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes or 1,024 Kilobytes. However, you can refer to it as 1,000,000 bytes. The prefix ‘Mega’ means one million. To put it into context a Megabyte (MB) could store the following:
- 873 pages of plain text (1,200 characters per page)
Gigabyte
A Gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. 1,024 Megabytes, or 1,048,576 Kilobytes. You can refer to it as 1,000,000,000 bytes! To put this into context a Gigabyte is enough to store the following:
- 894,784 pages of plaintext (1,200 characters)
- 640 web pages (with 1.6MB average file size)
- 341 digital pictures (with 3MB average file size)
- 1 750 MB Film
Terabyte
A Terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, 1,024 Gigabytes, or 1,048,576 Megabytes. You can refer to it as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. This would be large enough to store the following:
- 916,259,689 pages of plaintext (1,200 characters)
- 655,360 web pages (with 1.6MB average file size)
- 349,525 digital pictures (with 3MB average file size)
- 262,144 MP3 audio files (with 4MB average file size)
- 1,613 650MB CD’s
- 233 4.38GB Films
Lesson Tasks
