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What Are Bits

A bit is the smallest unit of digital data that can have a value of 0 or 1. Bytes group together 8 bits and are used to represent things like characters. Computer storage is measured in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and larger units that are powers of 1024, rather than powers of 1000, due to binary math. Hard drive manufacturers may use decimal units that differ from the binary units computers use.

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142 views2 pages

What Are Bits

A bit is the smallest unit of digital data that can have a value of 0 or 1. Bytes group together 8 bits and are used to represent things like characters. Computer storage is measured in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and larger units that are powers of 1024, rather than powers of 1000, due to binary math. Hard drive manufacturers may use decimal units that differ from the binary units computers use.

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marry mine
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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What are bits, bytes, and other units of measure for digital information?

A bit is a binary digit, the smallest increment of data on a computer. A bit can hold only one of two
values: 0 or 1, corresponding to the electrical values of off or on, respectively.

Because bits are so small, you rarely work with information one bit at a time. A group of 4 bits is called
nibble. A byte is eight bits, a word is 2 bytes (16 bits), a doubleword is 4 bytes (32 bits), and a
quadword is 8 bytes (64 bits). Bits are usually assembled into a group of eight to form a byte. A byte
contains enough information to store a single ASCII (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange) character, like "h".

A kilobyte (KB) is 1,024 bytes, not one thousand bytes as might be expected, because computers
use binary (base two) math, instead of a decimal (base ten) system.

Computer storage and memory is often measured in megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB). A medium-
sized novel contains about 1 MB of information. 1 MB is 1,024 kilobytes, or 1,048,576 (1024x1024)
bytes, not one million bytes.

Similarly, one 1 GB is 1,024 MB, or 1,073,741,824 (1024x1024x1024) bytes. A terabyte (TB) is 1,024
GB; 1 TB is about the same amount of information as all of the books in a large library, or roughly 1,610
CDs worth of data. A petabyte (PB) is 1,024 TB. 1 PB of data, if written on DVDs, would create roughly
223,100 DVDs, i.e., a stack about 878 feet tall, or a stack of CDs a mile high. Indiana University is now
building storage systems capable of holding petabytes of data. An exabyte (EB) is 1,024 PB. A zettabyte
(ZB) is 1,024 EB. Finally, a yottabyte (YB) is 1,024 ZB.

Many hard drive manufacturers use a decimal number system to define amounts of storage space. As a
result, 1 MB is defined as one million bytes, 1 GB is defined as one billion bytes, and so on. Since your
computer uses a binary system as mentioned above, you may notice a discrepancy between your hard
drive's published capacity and the capacity acknowledged by your computer. For example, a hard drive
that is said to contain 10 GB of storage space using a decimal system is actually capable of storing
10,000,000,000 bytes. However, in a binary system, 10 GB is 10,737,418,240 bytes. As a result, instead
of acknowledging 10 GB, your computer will acknowledge 9.31 GB. This is not a malfunction but a
matter of different definitions.

Computers count by base 2:


21 = 2

22 = 2*2 = 4

23 = 2*2*2 = 8

210 = 1,024

220 = 1,048,576

So in computer jargon, the following units are used:

Unit Equivalent

1 kilobyte (KB) 1,024 bytes

1 megabyte (MB) 1,048,576 bytes

1 gigabyte (GB) 1,073,741,824 bytes

1 terabyte (TB) 1,099,511,627,776 bytes


1 petabyte (PB) 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes

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