Bits and bytes. Bits, bytes

Any person who has interacted with computers even a little bit is familiar with such terms as "Gigabyte", "Megabyte" and others.

They indicate the volume of a physical storage medium, such as a flash drive, hard drive or the size of any file stored on the computer.
Simply put, this value indicates how much space on the computer any file occupies, or how much information the media can hold in total.

If you are reading this article in order to convert one unit of measure to another, then I recommend immediately using the free online calculator at the bottom of the page.

Enter any value in the field, select a value from the list and the calculator will perform the conversion.

What is a byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte

A few decades ago, the memory of computers was small, and amounted to no more than a dozen bits or a couple of bytes. It was possible to store several formulas there, a couple of examples or mathematical expressions.

Now the volumes hard drives amount to several terabytes, and file sizes are calculated in gigabytes. Therefore, with the progress of computer progress, there was a problem in recording how much memory a document occupies.

It was then that other quantities were invented that completely came out of the term "bit".

In other words, the terms "byte", "kilobyte", "megabyte" And "gigabyte" are universal units for measuring the amount of information that indicate how much space files take up on a hard drive.

How does it work?

All hard disks, SD cards, flash drives can be combined under one common name - physical medium.

talking plain language, all these physical media are made up of small cells for storing information.

In them, by means of a binary code, data is written that is transferred to it. These cells are called bits, and they are the smallest amount of computer information.

When you transfer information to a medium, it is, as it were, recorded in these memory cells and begins to take up space.

Actually, the file size indicates how many bytes will be used when storing a particular file. This is the principle of volume designation.

In addition, the data that is used in the system is temporarily recorded in a special area of \u200b\u200bmemory - operational.

They are there for as long as they are needed, and then they are unloaded. Data is written there in exactly the same cells, so RAM has its own volume designation, albeit much smaller than hard drives.

What is more - megabit or megabyte

Often, on the description of the USB ports of the motherboard, as well as in the characteristics for flash cards and other portable media, the information transfer rate is indicated.

It is designated as Gb / s or Mb / s, but do not confuse them - this is not gigabyte / second and not megabyte / second.

In this case, other units of measurement are designated as megabits and gigabits.

With their help, the speed of information transfer is measured.

These values are much smaller than megabytes and gigabytes, and they are calculated, unlike the above volumes, in a decimal number system.

One megabit is equal to approximately one million bits. One gigabit is equal to one billion bits of information.

Almost always, these designations can be seen in the speeds of Internet providers.

Therefore, if your network speed is 100 Mbps, then in one second of connection, 1,000,000 * 100 bits of information will be sent to your computer.

Internet connection technologies make it possible to offer users not megabit, but gigabit connection options.

USB 3.0 port standards allow you to transfer information at a speed of 5 Gb / s, and this is far from the limit - after all, now in motherboards connectors of higher and high-speed versions appear.

It is worth noting that the question of what is larger: a megabit or a megabyte is incorrect and cannot be answered.

These are different sizes different ways measurements. Although they are compared with each other, however, no one does this, since this does not make sense and is of no practical use.

How many megabytes in a gigabyte

More comes out of less. So, a group of eight bit cells creates one large byte cell, i.e. 8 bits = 1 byte.

1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte,
1024 kilobytes = 1 gigabyte,
1024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte.

Large volumes are not used in home PCs, so there is not much point in talking about them.

An ordinary user will immediately have a natural question - why are the calculations and gradation so strange?

Wouldn't it be easier to make 10 bits equal 1 byte, and 1 gigabyte correspond to 1000 megabytes?

Yes, indeed, it would be much easier. However, it is easier in the number system we are used to.

The point is this. In the real world, we use a range of numbers from 0 to 9. This is called decimal notation. But computers think differently: they only know two numbers - 0 and 1, that is their system of calculations is binary.

These numbers, conventionally, mean "Yes" or "No". In this case, they show whether the information storage cell is full or not.

Without going into mathematics, it is only worth saying that when translating numbers from a binary system understandable to a computer into our decimal system, two is raised to a certain degree.

And there are no numbers in the power of two that are multiples of 10. That is why the calculations are so strange: 1 byte in this case is equal to 2 to the 3rd power of a bit, and so on.

Thus, gradation is carried out from two, and the number is greater than large quantity once it is multiplied by itself.

Why is 1GB HDD not equal to 1000MB

Based on the explanation above, one gigabyte is more than a thousand megabytes by exactly 24 units. Therefore, in the characteristics hard drives write exactly - how much is their volume. These values cannot be rounded either.

Accordingly, 8 gigabytes of RAM is not 8000 megabytes, but 8192.

It is for the same reason that sometimes when buying a storage medium, its volume is slightly less than what is written in the specifications.

There simply cannot be an even value, so often nine gigabytes are found instead of the promised ten gigabytes.

Where are these values used?

As mentioned above, these terms are used in the computer IT field.

For example, when designating HDD capacity. Modern hard disks already have a capacity of more than one terabyte, and continue to expand.

With flash cards and other portable media, everything is more modest - their maximum volume can reach 128 gigabytes.

The same terms refer to the volume of files.

The spread in this regard is much greater, there are cases when a voluminous and large layer of information weighs several gigabytes, or text file, which takes only a couple of kilobytes.

Even more interesting is the situation with the computer's RAM.

Its size is also measured in memory cells, and now many professional machines are equipped with several ram dies, the total size of which can reach 128 gigabytes.

This is due to the fact that more and more resources are needed to process information - and in order for the program to work stably, there must be a lot of space in temporary memory.

Is there more?

Are there values larger than a terabyte? Yes, of course they are.

1024 terabytes is 1 petabyte.
1024 petabytes is 1 exabyte.

The fact is that modern technologies have not yet reached the creation of media, and even more so files, in volume and size at least close to these values - therefore, in Everyday life they are used very rarely.

However, they are widely used for computer calculations in science and high technology.

Given how fast technological progress is now, it is possible that in a couple of years hard drives with a capacity of 1024 terabytes will appear on the shelves.

Conversion table: bit, byte, KB, MB, GB, TB

There is a table of all the values that are used in modern hard drives, other storage media, and files.

It was created specifically for the convenience of accurately determining the amount of information and is given below. It includes only those units of measurement that can be seen and applied in real life.

After a terabyte, although measurement is being carried out, it is at the level of science and high technology, and not everyday life.

It is enough to simply determine how many bits per second are transmitted to your computer, divide the resulting value by 8, and then by 1024.

For example, at a speed of 100 Mb / s, approximately 12 megabytes of information will be transmitted to you in one second.

The disadvantage of the table is that it can only determine even values, which can be found infrequently.

In order to accurately determine the weight of a file or the size of a hard drive, you can use the online converter, which is presented just below.

Online unit converter

Of course, the information presented in the table of values is not enough for comfortable calculations.

There are very few files that will weigh exactly one gigabyte or a hundred megabytes, and therefore, even with this reference information at hand, it will be difficult to calculate how much storage media is needed in order to completely transfer a large document.

It is for this purpose that an online converter of values \u200b\u200bis installed on this site.

It works very simply - you specify the volume and value in which it is expressed. Next, you need to select the value to which you want to convert the number - and the converter will give you the exact value.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. What units of measurement do you know? Probably heard about bytes, bits, as well as megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. However, it is not always clear how these quantities are related to each other. how can you convert, for example, bytes to megabytes, bits to bytes, and gigabytes to terabytes.

The difficulty lies in the fact that we are used to operating with units of measurement in the decimal number system (everything is simple there - if there is a prefix “kilo”, then this is equivalent to multiplying by a thousand, etc.). But when measuring the volume of stored or used values from the binary system, where, for example, to convert megabytes to gigabytes, it will not be enough to carry out the usual division by a thousand. Why? Let's figure it out.

What is a byte/bit and how many bits are in a byte?

Described below units of information used in computer technology, for example, to measure the amount of RAM or the size of hard drives. The minimum unit of information is called a bit, then a byte follows, well, and then there are already derivatives of a byte: kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, etc. What is remarkable, despite the prefixes kilo-, mega-, giga-, recalculating these values into bytes is not a task, because simple multiplication by a thousand, a million or a billion is not applicable here. Why? Read below.

Also, similar units are used to measure the speed of information transfer (for example, through an Internet channel) - kilobit, megabit, gigabit, etc. Since this is speed, it means the number of bits (kilobit, megabit, gigabit, etc.) transmitted per second. How many bits are in a byte and how to convert kilobytes to kilobits? Let's talk about it right now.

As you all know, a computer only works with numbers in the binary system, namely with zeros and ones (“Boolean algebra”, if anyone studied at an institute or at school). One bit of information is a bit and it can take only two values - zero or one (there is a signal - there is no signal. I think that with the question what is a beat became more or less clear.

Go ahead. What then is a byte? This is already a bit more complicated. One byte consists of eight bits(in binary), each of which is a two to the power of two (from zero to two in the seventh - counted from right to left), as shown in the figure below:

It can also be written as:

11101001

It is not difficult to understand that the total number of possible combinations of zeros and ones in such a construction can only be 256 (this is the amount of information that can be encoded in one byte). By the way, converting a number from binary to decimal is quite simple. You just need to add up all the powers of two in those bits where there are ones. It doesn't get easier, does it?

See for yourself. In our example, the number 233 is encoded in one byte. How can this be understood? We just add the powers of two, where there is a one (i.e. there is a signal). Then it turns out we take one (2 to the power of zero), add eight (two to the power of 3), plus 32 (two to the fifth power), plus 64 (to the sixth), plus 128 (two to the seventh). Total gets 233 in decimal notation. As you can see, everything is very simple.

In the figure above, I have broken one byte into two parts of four bits. Each of these parts is called nibble or nibble. In one nibble, using four bits, you can encode just any hexadecimal number (a number from 0 to 15, or rather up to F, because the numbers following nine in the hexadecimal system are denoted by letters from the beginning of the English alphabet). But that's not the point anymore.

How many megabits in a megabyte?

Let's be more clear. Very often, Internet speed is measured in kilobits, megabits and gigabits, and, for example, programs give out speed in kilobytes, megabytes ... And how much will it be in bytes? How to convert megabits to megabytes?. Everything is simple and without pitfalls. If there are 8 bits in one byte, then there are 8 kilobits in one kilobyte, and 8 megabits in one megabyte. All clear? It's the same with gigabits, terabits, etc. The reverse translation is done by dividing by eight.

How many megabytes are in 1 gigabyte (bytes and kilobytes in megabytes)?

The answer to this question will no longer be so prosaic. The fact is that historically it so happened that to denote units of measurement of information, significantly larger bytes, incorrect terms are used(Or, to be more precise, not true at all). The fact is that, for example, the prefix "kilo" means multiplication by ten to the third degree, i.e. 10 3 (per thousand), "mega" - multiplication by 10 6 (tobish per million), "giga" - by 10 9, "tera" - by 10 12, etc.

But this is a decimal system, you say, and bits and bytes are binary. And you will be absolutely right. And in the binary system, there is a different terminology and, most importantly, another scoring system- how many bytes are contained in 1 kilobyte (how many kilobytes are in 1 megabyte, how many megabytes are in 1 gigabyte, and ...). Everything is based not on powers of ten (as in the decimal system, which uses the prefixes kilo, mega, tera ...), but on powers of two(in which other prefixes are already used: kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, etc.).

Those. in theory, to denote large units of information names should be used: kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte, etc. But for a number of reasons (a habit, and these units turned out to be not very harmonious, especially in the Russian version, yobibyte sounds cool, instead of iotabyte) these correct names did not take root, but instead of them they began to use the wrong ones, i.e. megabyte, terabyte, iotabyte and others that, in fairness, cannot be used in the binary system.

This is where all the confusion comes from. We all know that “kilo” is a multiplication by 10 3 (one thousand). It is quite logical to assume that a kilobyte is simply 1000 bytes, but it is not. We are told that 1 kilobyte 1024 bytes. And this is true, because as I explained a little higher, they initially started using the wrong terminology and continue to do so until now.

How is the conversion of kilo-, mega-, giga- and other large bytes into ordinary bytes carried out? As I said, by powers of two.

How many bytes are in 1 kilobyte - 2 10 (two to the tenth power) or the same 1024 bytes
And how many bytes are in 1 megabyte - 2 20 (two in the twentieth) or 1048576 bytes (which is equivalent to 1024 times 1024)
And how many bytes are in 1 gigabyte - 2 30 or 107374824 bytes (1024 × 1024x1024)
1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes, 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes and 1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes

How to convert kilobytes to bytes, and megabytes to gigabytes and terabytes?

Full table (for comparison, the decimal system is also shown) conversion of bytes to kilo, mega, giga and terabytes is given below:

Decimal system			Binary system
Name	Dimension	Ten at...	Name	Dimension	Double in...
byte	B	10 0	byte	IN	2 0
kilo byte	kB	10 3	kibi byte	KiB KiB	2 10
mega byte	MB	10 6	mebi byte	MiB MB	2 20
giga byte	GB	10 9	gibi byte	GiB GB	2 30
tera byte	TV	10 12	you byte	TiB TB	2 40
peta byte	PB	10 15	pebi byte	PiB PB	2 50
exa byte	EB	10 18	xby byte	EiB Ebyte	2 60
zetta byte	ZB	10 21	zebi byte	ZiB Zbyte	2 70
yotta byte	YB	10 24	yobi byte	YiB	2 80

Based on the table above, you can make any conversion, but you need to keep in mind that you should compare the names from the decimal system with the formula for calculating from the binary.

To simplify"Unnecessary" data from the table can be simply removed:

Name	Dimension	Formula for converting to bytes
byte	IN	2 0
kilo byte	KB	2 10
mega byte	MB	2 20
giga byte	GB	2 30
tera byte	TB	2 40
peta byte	pb	2 50
exa byte	Ebyte	2 60
zetta byte	Zbyte	2 70
yotta byte	Ybyte	2 80

Let's let's practice a little:

How many megabytes are in 1 gigabyte? That's right, 2 10 (calculated by dividing 2 30 by 2 20) or 1024 megabytes in one gigabyte.
How many kilobytes are in a megabyte? Yes, the same number - 1024 (calculated by dividing 2 20 by 2 10).
How many kilobytes are in 1 terabyte? This is a bit more complicated, because you need to divide 2 40 by 2 10 , which will give us 2 30 or 1073741824 kilobytes in one terabyte (and not a billion, as it would be in the decimal system).
What needs to be done to convert bytes to megabytes? We look at the table: divide the available number of bytes by 2 20 (by 107374824). Those. you don't just divide by a million, like in decimal (actually moving the decimal point to the left by six places), but divide by a slightly larger number, resulting in a smaller megabyte than you expected.
How many bytes are in 1 kilobyte? Obviously, 2 10 or 1024 bytes in one kilobyte.

I think you understand the principle.

Why is a terabyte hard drive 900 gigabytes in size?

However, many manufacturers of hard drives use the confusion described above. You have never been surprised that having bought, for example, a 1 terabyte disk, after installing it in a computer and formatting, you get a little more than 900 gigabytes. Where do almost ten percent of the size of the railway declared by the manufacturer disappear?

The fact is that, for example, when measuring the amount of RAM, they always use the binary (correct) calculation system, when 1 kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes, but hard drive manufacturers go for the trick and consider the dimensions of their products in decimal megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. What does this mean and what gain does it give in practice?

Well, see for yourself - they have one kilobyte of memory contains 1000 bytes. It seems that the difference is nonsense, but with the current sizes of hard drives measured in terabytes, everything results in the loss of tens of gigabytes.

Thus, it turns out that a terabyte disk contains simply 10 12 bytes (trillion). However, when formatting such a disk, the calculation will be carried out according to the correct binary system, and as a result, we will get only 0.9094947017729282379150390625 real (and not decimal) terabytes from a trillion bytes. To recalculate, you just need to divide 10 12 by 2 40 - see the comparison table above.

That's all. With such a simple trick, they sell us a product with ten percent less utility than we expect. From a legal point of view, you can’t dig there, but from the usual point of view of the layman, we are pretty well misled. True, depending on the manufacturer, the figure may vary slightly, but a terabyte will still not work out in the end.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the blog pages site

Unit	Abbreviation	How many
bit	b	0 or 1bit
byte	B	8 bit
kilobit	kbit (kb)	1,000 bits
kilobyte	KByte (KB)	1024 bytes
megabit	mbit (mb)	1,000 kilobits
megabyte	MB (MB)	1024 kilobytes
gigabit	gbit (gb)	1,000 megabits
gigabyte	GB (GB)	1024 megabytes
terabit	tbit (tb)	1,000 gigabits
terabyte	TByte (TB)	1024 gigabytes

Bytes, Bits, Kilobits, Kilobytes, Megabits, Megabytes, Gigabits, Gigabytes, Terabits, Terabytes, Petabits, Petabytes, Exbits, Exbytes Converter

7.2 terabytes per DVD size

Australian researchers have created a technology that theoretically allows you to burn 7.2 terabytes of data on a single disc the size of a regular DVD. This is reported by Nature News, and the researchers' article appeared in the journal Nature.

In modern DVD drives, information is recorded using a laser beam that burns grooves on the surface of the disc. The new technology works in a similar way. The main difference is that instead of the appearance of notches on the surface of the disk, gold nanopins are melted.

So high density Recording information scientists managed to achieve with the help of several techniques. First, the researchers used lasers in multiple colors. The fact is that rays of a certain wavelength affect only pins with a certain ratio of length and thickness. Secondly, the researchers used beams with different polarizations that act on pins oriented in a certain way.

Using rays of different colors and different polarizations, it is possible to record information on the same region of the disk several times. So, for example, two types of polarization and three colors (that is, a total of six possible combinations) allow you to write 1.6 terabytes of data on a disc the size of a DVD. If you add one more polarization option, you get a disk with a capacity of 7.2 terabytes.

To read the information, the researchers use a weak laser beam that does not melt the nanorods. In this case, a readable signal is obtained at the output: it has been empirically established that nanorods “respond” to a weak laser much better than, for example, spherical nanoparticles, into which the rods turn after melting.

Weak side new technology is that researchers use laser pulses of very short duration - on the order of a few femtoseconds. Such lasers are expensive and difficult to manufacture. Scientists hope that further development of technology will overcome this limitation. They expect that the industrial use of their discovery will begin around the 2020s. ♌

Catching goldfish online

Some modern users Those who understand computers can say with confidence that one byte contains eight bits of information, and they will be right in their own way. However, this is not always the case: in this article, we will tell you in more detail how many bits are in a byte.

The history of bytes and bits

Most modern computers use just such information, where one byte equals eight bits. But the thing is that old computers (that is, one of the first) used a byte with a completely different number of bits, where one byte contained from six to nine bits. In fact, a byte is a unit of information that was invented relatively recently. A byte became equal to eight bits only since 1970, since it was then that a standard was introduced for this.

Why a byte is exactly eight, no one will tell you for sure, but let's at least figure out why eight bits were chosen as the standard. So, in one of the old computing systems one digit occupied four bits. And therefore, a byte equal to eight bits made it possible to contain two-digit numbers and, thus, a six-bit byte became useless, since two digits simply could not fit into a byte.

Another version of why they adopted the standard equal to eight is that all numbers associated with a computer are a multiple of exactly eight. Example: RAM. First comes 128 megabytes, then 256, a little later 512, and then gigabytes come (one, two, four, eight, etc.) Here is the result: four bits are too few, 16 have never been used, but eight - just what you need.

Convert bits to bytes and vice versa

Let's now try to answer the question, how many bits contain 2 bytes? So, we know that one byte is equal to eight, respectively, eight must be multiplied by two, we get sixteen. It turns out that two bytes contain sixteen bits.

It's useful to know that 1024 bytes is a kilobyte (or you can say that a kilobyte is 8192 bytes), 1024 kilobytes is a megabyte, and 1024 megabytes is a gigabyte. Accordingly, a terabyte is already 1024 gigabytes. It must be said that in Lately information has already begun to be measured in terabytes, so this knowledge will soon be useful to us.

You may also be interested to know other information on this topic from our article.

What is now measured in bits and bytes? The average PC user has practically forgotten about such units of information. And I would have completely forgotten if it were not for the confusion between kilobits and kilobytes, in which travel speeds on the Internet are measured. Meanwhile, since school, everyone knows that the prefix kilo- multiplies the original figure by a thousand. Trying to figure it out, the user divides, multiplies and finally gets confused in the wilds of arithmetic. Let's take the key concepts - bit and byte - and see what sauce they are eaten with.

Definition

Bit- the minimum unit for measuring the amount of information (like a letter in linguistics). In the binary number system, a bit is equal to one bit.

Byte- a unit of storage and processing of digital information, which is a set of bits that the system can process simultaneously (in linguistics they would call it a word).

Comparison

One byte has 8 bits. A bit can be 0 or 1, a byte can be from 0 to 256. When it comes to data transfer rates, bit/s and byte/s (Kbps and Kbps respectively) are quite different. In kilobits, the connection speed is considered, or the amount of information received / transmitted per unit of time. In kilobytes, the speed of downloading files is usually displayed. Thus, with a connection speed of 128 Kbps, the download speed (in ideal conditions) will be 16 Kb / s, that is, a 160 Kb document will be loaded in 10 seconds.

Findings site

Bit - the minimum unit of measure, byte - a unit of storage and processing of digital information
One byte has 8 bits
When determining the connection speed, they usually operate in bits, the speed of downloading files - bytes.

Quadcopters DJI Phantom

Mi 35 military helicopter

In Russia presented ultralight high-speed helicopter "Afalina"

Program for burning mp3 disc