Bits vs Bytes?
Mega vs Giga?
Kilo vs Kibi?
And what the heck is a Yotta Byte?
Units of memory have not been historically the easiest to keep straight.
But if you are shopping new storage or memory for your device, today’s memory unit quick guide
has got your back whether you are looking to save a text file or a weekend's worth of 4k home videos.
This is DIY in 5!
Welcome to DIY in 5!
My name is Trisha Hershberger and today’s episode will delve into the various units
of memory - gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte and just how much can each of those store?
Let’s find out.
Before we get into the bits and bytes of it all, I humbly ask that if you find the information
in today’s video useful, please feel free to like this video, subscribe to this channel
and ring that bell so that you don’t miss out on any future tech tips.
A bit is one single binary digit and it’s either a 0 or a 1.
You’ll see bits represented by a small “b.”
A byte is typically 8 bits, and together one byte usually represents a character like a letter or number.
Bytes are abbreviated with a large “B” as in Megabytes.
This is especially important when looking at internet speeds for example.
If you have a 100Mbps download speed that is very different than 100MB/s, 8 times less in fact.
Since internet speeds are normally measured in megabits per second, this can get rather confusing
for folks unfamiliar with the smallest units of data measurement.
Just think, larger B, large, small b - small.
Most memory is measured from here in bytes.
You’ve probably heard of kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on.
In practice, a kilobyte means 1000 bytes, but that’s not entirely accurate.
Because of how the binary system works, one kilobyte actually equals 1024 bytes, not an even 1000.
This difference gets larger as we go up the ladder.
This is why a 250GB hard drive may only display 232GB of usable storage for example,
because humans and computers measure things differently.
That’s the most confusing part of all of this.
Once we acknowledge that then the prefixes mean just what you would think - kilo is 1000,
mega is 1000 (technically 1024) of those, giga is 1000 (but technically 1024) of those and so on.
To put it in perspective, one kilobyte - capital K capital B - is roughly one very short story.
Graphics of small websites may range from 5-100 kilobytes.
A megabyte, or capital M capital B - is roughly 1000 that size so 1 megabyte is approximately
4 full books worth of data.
A high-resolution photo may be approximately 2MB.
A 3-minute song saved in a compressed version may be roughly 3MB in size,
and the uncompressed version may take up to 30 MB of disk space.
Next up, times it by 1000 again and you get a Gigabyte, capital G, capital B - or sometimes abbreviated as “gigs.”
1GB worth of data is about one movie at TV quality or 230 music tracks or 600 5-megapixel photos.
Now anything that can hold more than 1000 gigs,
will be measured in terabytes or capital T, capital B.
At this point we are looking at one trillion bytes of information and that’s a lot!
A basic CD holds about 700MB and a DVD holds roughly 4.7GB.
You'd thus need nearly 1,430 CDs or 213 DVDs to get one terabyte of storage!
You may see new computers or gaming consoles offering 1TB or larger hard drives and if
you download many AAA games, high-res movies, or deal with large files on the regular for
your job, you may even want to upgrade beyond that.
You are watching this on Kingston’s YouTube channel so I feel obligated to mention that
Kingston makes some kickin 1TB & larger SSDs if you are looking for an upgrade - just sayin.
Alright, so what’s beyond 1TB?
1000, but technically 1024 TBs of data is known as a petabyte or capital P, capital B.
This is one thousand units of one trillion - so one quadrillion bytes.
Most of the consumer storage devices can hold a maximum of a few TBs,
therefore, petabytes are rarely used to measure memory capacity of a single device.
Instead, PetaBytes are used to measure the total data stored in large networks or server farms.
For example, internet giants like Google and Facebook
store more than over 100 PBs of data on their data servers.
Games like World of Warcraft need online servers that can handle 1.5 petabytes of storage to
run and the US Library of Congress contains over 7 petabytes of digital data in its archives.
I know the scale of petabytes can seem hard to conceptualize but once you start thinking
about these larger real life scenarios, you can see why we need a term for it.
Now, even larger than that, we have terms like Exabyte, or capital E, capital B,
Zettabyte - capital Z, capital B, and Yottabyte - capital Y, capital B.
These units of measurement are so large you will probably never really need to know them,
not yet at least.
But hey, the sky’s the limit for the future!
Just to give you an idea, several hundred exabytes of data are transferred over the internet in a year.
All the data in the world is just a few zettabytes and yottabytes,
at this point are used for conceptualizations only.
But now you know.
It’s wild to think how far we’ve come in just a few short decades in terms of
consumer storage and where we might be in the next 5-10 years.
Anywho, I’m gonna go add another TB of storage to my gaming PC because Age of Empires IV
alone took up a quarter of my storage - but totally worth it and the campaign rules.
Alright everyone, see ya next time with more DIY in 5!