Learning About Storage Capacities

Bit: The basic unit of information in a binary numbering system. The electronic circuitry in computers detect the difference between two states (high current and low current) and represents these two states as one of two numbers 1 or 0. These basic units of information are called bits. Eight bits make what is called a byte.
  1 Byte: A single character (8 bits)

Kilobyte A thousand bytes.

• 2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page

Megabyte (A million bytes)
One 3.5 inch floppy disk (actually holds about 1.38Mb)

•  5 Megabytes: 30 seconds of TV-quality video (imagine how big a 2 hour movie is)
   
• 10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound
   
• 20 Megabytes: An entire web site including all images and databases.
   
• 700 Megabytes: A Typical CD-ROM.  Approximately 80 minutes of music
   

Gigabyte (A billion bytes bytes)

• 1 Gigabyte: A pickup truck filled with paper -or- A movie at TV quality
   
• 4 Gigabytes: All the books in our library
   
• 4.6 Gigabyte: a full DVD CD
   
• 60 Gigabytes: The hard disk of the average home PC (2003-2004)
   

Terabyte (1,099,511,627,776 bytes)

• 1 Terabyte: All the X-ray films in a large technological hospital
   
• 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress
   

Petabyte (1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes)
 

• 200 Petabytes: All printed material
   

Exabyte (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes)

• 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
   

Zettabyte 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 bytes
 

Yottabyte 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 bytes

Some of the information on this page is from http://www.bergesch.com/bcs/storage.htm