KiloByte, MegaByte or GigaByte

Digital Storage – Units of Measure

What is a kilobyte and a terabyte it’s so confusing?

Actually it’s very simple… but you are probably right it can be confusing if you are not in the know, but this information is important to know if you want to buy storage for your collections.

Right myth-buster first: 

Computers don’t count like we do, they double the previous factor; yes it’s a bit much to take into account but you need to understand that; eg 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024. Technically the measure of 1KB should be 1024 Bytes and so forth, but the unit of measure was simplified to save confusion.

Table of measure for computers, everything is measured in ‘bytes’

Measure                           Abbr.                     Actual measure          

1 Byte                                1B                           8 Bits                     

1 KiloByte                         1KB                         1000 Bytes                      

1 MegaByte                     1MB                       1000 KiloBytes               

1 GigaByte                        1GB                        1000 MegaBytes           

1 TeraByte                        1TB                         1000 GigaBytes              

There is a level below 1 Byte, it is 1 ‘Bit’  8 Bits make a Byte, and this doesn’t stop there, extract from solutionsreview.com

Bits are the basic building blocks of not only data storage, but all computers. Computers work in binary digits, combining 0’s and 1’s in countless patterns. These binary digits are known as bits, and are the smallest possible unit for data storage.

When 8 bits are combined, you get a byte. Bytes are used to store a single character; whether’s it a letter, number, or punctuation. All memory storage is expressed in terms of bytes, so although bits might be the foundation upon which data storage is built, bytes are the building blocks that truly denote the usability of any one storage solution.

Because storage is expressed in terms of bytes, all greater units are typically referred to by their shortened names. This means that you could keep adding more prefixes to talk about more and more data. Above terabyte, we have petabyte (PB), exabyte (EB), zettabyte (ZB), and yottabyte (YB). Once the numbers get high enough, it can be difficult to realistically visualize how much data we’re talking about. This volume of data is really only relevant to tech giants and massive corporations. But as the need for greater storage increases with the volume of data over time, we will inevitably develop the necessary vocabulary.

We hope this helps you understand the storage ladder, just for comparison below you can see what some of your Crafty Witches products are in size, and you can work out what storage needs you require based on that:

Fairy Kingdom SVG’s                             34KB

Crowning Glory – SVG collection       3.4MB

Spellbinding Classics – Minty Green 72MB

Ribbon Tent Cards Kit & SVG’s           78MB

Paper Potions Summer Days Toppers   82MB

Essential Festive Inserts                       134MB

Magical Season – Mini-Kit                   142MB

Pollyanna – The Red Stag Mini-Kit     157MB

Paper Potion VIII – Stained Glass       214MB

Book of Spells V – Christmas Edition 609MB

Summer Days – Main Collection        714MB

May Medley – 10 Mini-kits                  1.26GB

Pollyanna – The Magic of Christmas 4.55GB

As you can see from the list above, The Crafty Witches offer a multitude of products, which are different sizes.

Even within the ‘Mini-kits’ and ‘Paper Potions – Toppers’ you can identify that the kits are not of similar size, this is solely down to the fact that some of the kits are more graphically intensive than others. The Summer Days is a main collection has more content hence it’s size.

Similarly look at the size of the Medley bundles, a massive 1.3 GB, not to mention the giant that is the Pollyanna Pickering main collections at 4.5 GB. This is why we advise to give time to allow these massive files to download from the client to your device. In contrast the SVG files at the other end of the spectrum, less that 1MB!