Ask The Wizard - Bits, Bytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes and Terabytes

Dear Wizard of 'OZ',

What is the difference and also, what are bits and bytes?

Signed,

Curious George

Dear George,

Bits, bytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes are units of measurement used to express the amount of digital information stored or transmitted.

A bit is the smallest unit of digital information and can be represented as a 0 or 1. It is short for "binary digit."

A byte is a unit of digital information that consists of 8 bits. It is commonly used to represent a single character, such as a letter or number.

A kilobyte (KB) is a unit of digital information equal to 1,024 bytes. It is commonly used to express the size of small files such as a document or a photo.

A megabyte (MB) is a unit of digital information equal to 1,024 kilobytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. It is commonly used to express the size of larger files such as a video or an audio file.

A gigabyte (GB) is a unit of digital information equal to 1,024 megabytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. It is commonly used to express the size of very large files such as a database or a high-resolution video.

A terabyte (TB) is a unit of digital information equal to 1,024 gigabytes, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. To put into perspective, 1 TB can contain 250,000 photos taken with a 12MP camera OR 250 movies or 500 hours of HD video OR 6.5 million document pages, commonly stored as Office files, PDFs, and presentations. It's also equal to 1,300 physical filing cabinets of paper–and a whole lot lighter! (The Wizard has 13 TB of available hard disk storage space!)

Note:

MiB and GiB are units of measurement used to express digital storage capacity or data transfer rates, just like MB and GB. However, they use binary notation rather than decimal notation.

A mebibyte (MiB) is a unit of digital information equal to 1,024 kibibytes (KiB) or 1,048,576 bytes. Similarly, a gibibyte (GiB) is a unit of digital information equal to 1,024 mebibytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

These units are used mainly in the computer industry when referring to the amount of memory or storage capacity of a computer system, as well as the transfer rates of digital data over networks or storage media. In some cases, MiB and GiB may be used interchangeably with MB and GB, but it's important to note that the former uses binary notation, while the latter uses decimal notation, which can result in slightly different values.