June 5, 2013
Virtual Storage Units in Practical Terms
Most people who are in any way tech-savvy know that a terabyte is bigger than a gigabyte, and a kilobyte is smaller than all of them. But what are the actual values of these memory sizes – and even more importantly, what in the world do they mean in practical terms? The experts at ITS Inc. are here to tell you.
When it comes to thinking about “storage” in the virtual sense, it’s a little more complicated than concrete units of measurement, so let’s lay it all out. When you break it down to the bare essentials, 1 byte is a unit of data that stores one character. This means that the word byte, because it’s 4 characters long, is comprised of 4 bytes.
Kilobytes to Megabytes, Gigabytes to Terabytes
The prefix kilo- usually means “one thousand,” but a kilobyte is worth 1,024 bytes. The discrepancy? Computer design makes it so, say the IBM certified consultants at ITS Inc. This means that a megabyte is worth 1,024 kilobytes, and a gigabyte is worth 1,024 megabytes. A terabyte is worth—you guessed it—1,024 gigabytes. A petabyte? Most people can’t even think this far, but it’s 1,024 terabytes – a total of a quadrillion bytes.
Size Unit Conversion – Think It Through Practical Implications
Take this example from IBM. A file size of 54,183,672,092 bytes is not the same as 54 gigabytes. If you divide this number by 1,024 you’ll find that it’s roughly 52,913,742 kilobytes. Divide it again and you get about 51,674 megabytes. Divide that number a third time and you end up with about 50.5 gigabytes – a pretty significant difference.When converting between virtual storage unit sizes, it gets a little more confusing than concrete measurements – you can’t pour 1,024 megabytes into a container to see a gigabyte, like you could with four quarts into a gallon. And because the conversion factor is not an even thousand, the discrepancy between what you assume and the actual size can be pretty significant.
A lot of computer people who are trying to sell you something will give you some practical terms. With 1 simple gigabyte of storage space, you can hold roughly 7 minutes of HD video – a huge leap from the floppy disks of ages past that held a few thousand bytes. Get all the way up to 20 petabytes and, believe it or not, you’re at the amount of data that Google processes every single day.
If this is still not making sense — yes, we know it’s a lot take in — then give us a call and we’ll do our best to break it all down.
Thanks for reading,
Rob Connary, President - COO
