The terms used to measure digital storage can be very mysterious. Most people have heard of kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes but it takes a deep understanding to easily associate these terms with understandable amounts of information. When people hear “6 feet” they understand it as “about the length of a person” or understand “40 miles” as “about the distance from Burlington to Waitsfield.” However, most people have no idea how much a kilobyte or a megabyte actually is. Today, I will try to help you gain a deeper understanding of these terms.
The prefixes (kilo, mega, etc) for the terms are taken from the metric system, and are also used to measure things like weight and distance. If you are familiar with measuring large quantities in the metric system, you already understand how to measure, data even if you don’t know it yet.
- 1 bit: A single 0 or 1, in the form of a magnetic signal or a stored electrical charge.
- 1 byte: Eight 0s or 1s.
- 1 kilobyte: 1,024 bytes.
- 1 megabyte: 1024 kilobytes.
- 1 gigabyte: 1,024 megabytes.
- 1 terabyte: 1,024 gigabytes.
- 1 petabyte: 1,024 gigabytes.
- 1 exabyte: 1,024 petabytes.
Now some reference points for you to use:
- 1 byte: A single character of unformatted text.
- 1-100 KB (kilobyte): A text document anywhere from a few sentences to a few pages. Also, very small images, mainly used for previews.
- 100 KB-1 MB (megabyte): A “normal” sized image, about 5-10 square inches.
- 1.44 MB: Storage capacity of a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
- 1-10 MB: A high resolution image, or audio files of about 2-5 minutes.
- 10-100 MB: About 2-15 minutes of 480p “normal quality” video. Most simpler applications for computers or mobile devices.
- 700 MB: Storage capacity of a CD.
- 100 MB-1 GB (gigabyte): About 15-150 minutes of 480p “normal quality video” or about 3-30 minutes of 1080p high definition video. More complex software applications.
- 1-2 GB: Advanced software applications such as Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Adobe Photoshop, etc.
- 2-4 GB: The approximate size of 1 full-length compressed, high definition movie.
- 4.7 GB: Storage capacity of the most common type of DVD.
- 1-10 GB: Older or less advanced video games.
- 10-30 GB: Modern, advanced video games.
- 16-256 GB: Storage capacity for most modern smartphones.
- 100 GB – 1 TB (terabyte): Storage capacity for most modern laptop computers.
- 1 TB – 3 TB: Storage capacity for most modern desktop computers.
After a few terabytes, we start to talk about very large amounts of data, much more than most people will ever need to deal with. If someone refers to 10+ terabytes of data, they are most likely talking about a library of data that is stored for by an organization, not an individual person. To give a sense of scale for the larger terms, I will include some examples of these as well. For these, the data is not publicly available, so the information is from estimates over the last few years from various sources.
- 3 PB (petabyte): Estimated video available to stream on Netflix.
- 20 PB: Estimated total size of Google Maps.
- 24 PB: Estimated total video uploaded to YouTube per day.
- 357 PB: Estimated total photos stored by Facebook (estimated at 960 billion photos).
- 10 EB (exabyte): Estimated total storage of Google.
- 12 EB: Estimated storage of the NSA’s Utah Data Center.
I hope this information helps you to become more familiar with measurements of data!