I want to talk to you today about terms that for many seem complicated (but they are not), and incidentally share with you this curious image based on Russian dolls where dolls of smaller and smaller sizes are inside the others.
This time this concept has been used to visually demonstrate the relationship of the order (although not of the scale) that exists between the concepts of TeraBytes, GigaBytes, MegaBytes, KiloBytes, Bytes and bits.
For even more curious, we let you know that after TeraBytes come the PetaBytes, the ExaBytes, the ZettaBytes and the YottaBytes. Likewise a few decades ago, the term Nibble was also used to mean 4 bits.
In addition, historically the term Word is used to mean 2 bytes (16 bits) and Long Word for 4 bytes (32 bits).
Note also that 8 bits make up 1 Byte, but from then on each new order is exactly 1,024 from the previous one. That is, 1 KiloByte (KB) is 1,024 bytes. 1 MegaBytes (MB) is 1,024 KB. 1 GigaByte (GB) is 1,024 MB, and so on.
Another thing to note is the difference between the lowercase "b" and the uppercase "B". "B" always means "bit", while "b" always means "byte". This is extremely important to know, and many column writers who do not know this difference sometimes do not make this distinction, resulting in what they publish is actually 8 times greater or 8 times less than reality (because 8 bits are 1 byte)
Example: If someone says that a flash memory card is on the way with 1,024GB of laptop memory, I would be the first to surprise me and at the same time doubt it, since the most possible is that (today) the writer meant 1,024Gb (i.e., Gigabits, not GigaBytes), where those 1,024Gb actually equals 128GB, which is somewhat more feasible than 1,024GB.
The same happens with Internet speeds. If someone tells you that it sells you an Internet line with 10MBps (10 MegaBytes per second), at least today in much of the world this would give reason for a technical person to doubt it, because most likely they wanted to say 10Mbps (10 Megabits per second), which would be equivalent to about 1.25 MBps, which is more sensitive.
And do not doubt that many companies know that very well, and yet they make the "mistake" [intentional] of putting a "B" instead of a "b" to confuse.
Another importance of knowing all this is seen in the world of hard drives. Every engineer knows that 1 GigaByte is 1,024 MegaBytes, but the industry of hard disk manufacturers assumes a decimal system and classifies 1 GigaByte as 1,000 MegaBytes (and they do the same with TB, KB, etc.). This is obviously something done deliberately to deceive the consumer, and although a while ago that did not show much, today when you buy a 1TB hard drive you will be surprised to know that magically for some strange reason 24 GigaBytes have disappeared, which does not seem much but it is enough to store a lot of videos and thousands of photos (note that when you "format" you also lose some space, but that is a technicality that does not affect the fact of this deception).
Finally, for people who are not technical and who want to have a sense of the relationship of these scales in the real world, 1 Byte (8 bits) is enough to store (with a little extra space) a letter of our language , as well as numerals and other symbols. This means that in 1 KB of memory you can store 1,024 bytes, or 1,024 letters, and in 1 MB you can store 1,024 times that amount, that is, 1,024 KB, or 1,048,576 letters.
That means that in a typical laptop of today that has 100GB of free space on the hard disk, that in it you can store some incredible 107,374,182,400 letters (more than one hundred billion letters).
This should give you pause and marvel at how incredible technology is evolving. Just 10 years ago we stored data on discs of less than 1MB, and today we already talk about 100GB discs (more than 100,000MB) as something completely normal (with 1TB discs already available in the market). Amazing.
So, in summary we have this:
1 bit
1 Byte = 8 bits
1 KiloByte (KB) = 1,024 Bytes
1 MegaByte (MB) = 1,024 KB
1 GigaByte (GB) = 1,024 MB
1 TeraByte (TB) = 1,024 GB
1 PetaByte (PB ) = 1,024 TB
1 ExaByte (EB) = 1,024 PB
1 ZettaByte (ZB) = 1,024 EB
1 YottaByte (YB) = 1,024 ZB
1 XeraByte (XB) = 1,024 YB
And additionally:
1 bit
1 Nibble = 4 bits
1 Byte = 2 Nibles = 8 bits
1 Word = 2 Bytes = 16 bits
1 Long Word = 4 Bytes = 32 bits
I hope this has been useful to some.
