Computers today, can hold a lot of information;
the terminology can get confusing.
Gigabytes,
Terabytes,
and what's a Petabyte?
Let's start at the beginning.
This cube here, represents the smallest piece of
information a computer can hold.
It's called a Bit.
It stores two different states, or values.
You can think of this as a true or false,
on or off,
yes or no.
But most commonly, it's thought of as a 1 or a 0.
Now let's add another Bit.
By changing these two Bits to different combinations of ones and zeros,
we can now store four different values.
Zero Zero, Zero One, One Zero and One One.
This is how you count from 0 to 3 in binary.
Now let's add another Bit,
you can store 8 different values now.
Each time you add a Bit, you double the amount of information you can store.
Once we get to 8 Bits, we group them together.
This is called a Byte.
It can store 256 different values.
A Byte is also enough space to store a single character,
such as a letter, number or symbol.
Add more Bytes, and we can store
larger numbers,
colors,
and we can even put many characters together to form sentences.
We're going to need a lot more Bytes to store something useful.
When you have 1024 Bytes, we call this a Kilobyte.
Now you might ask, why the 1024?
Why not 1000?
Hang tight, I'm going to talk about this towards the end of the video.
A Kilobyte is enough space to store a small text document.
To store a low-resolution picture,
you're going to need somewhere around 100 Kilobytes.
Once you get to 1024 Kilobytes we call this a Megabyte.
One minute of MP3 audio, is about 1 Megabyte.
Those old 3.5 inch floppy discs can hold 1.44 Megabytes of information.
A high-resolution picture can be around 5 Megabytes.
A CD can hold up to 700 Megabytes
1024 Megabytes is called a Gigabyte.
A DVD can hold up 4.7 Gigabytes.
A Blu-ray Disc can hold up to 25 Gigabytes.
A Flash Drive today can hold 32, 64 or 128 Gigabytes.
They'll probably have something larger by the time you watch this video.
1024 Gigabytes is called a Terabyte.
A Hard Drive will be anywhere from 1 to 8 Terabytes.
1024 Terabytes is called a Petabyte.
Web servers for companies such as Facebook,
YouTube or Amazon will be measured in Petabytes.
1024 Petabytes is called an Exabyte.
The amount of internet traffic every month,
will be measured in Exabytes.
After Exabytes, comes Zettabyte
and then... Yottabyte.
Well, you get the idea, so big, you probably won't
hear to much about Yottabytes for a while...
maybe someday though...
Ok, let's get a birds eye view of all of this.
8 Bits to a Byte,
and 1024 for every jump after that.
So there's 1024 Bytes to a Kilobyte,
and 1024 Kilobytes to a Megabyte and so on...
So why not 1000?
Actually, by some definitions it is 1000.
But, most of the time we mean 1024.
Computers like the number 2.
If you multiply 2 by itself 10 times you get 1024.
This is why computers like that better.
So there you have it,
next time you hear one of these words,
you'll know what it means.
My name's Jared Owen. Thanks for watching.