Know your bits from your bytes!

hard disk space explained

You only need to know 1 number for it to be clear 1024

It can be confusing for people even the experienced to work out all these numbers and sizes when it come to datasize.

Hopefully this will explain lets start at the root of the datasize list 1 bit, what is this? it is the smallest data size and it can be “on” or “off”, it takes 8 bits to make up 1 character say the letter “A”, 8 bits is also equals to 1 byte.

OK from this point its easy! 1024 bytes equals 1 Kilobyte, 1024 Kilobytes equals 1 Megabyte, 1024 Megabytes equals 1 Gigabyte, 1024 Gigabytes equals 1 Terabyte and so on…

People will often round down say they buy a 1 Gigabyte hardrive it will actually be 1024 Megabytes (well it should unless the manufacturer is being sneaky!, it does happen)

for more info visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

Hopefully that has made the datasize confusion a bit clearer.