KiloByte, MegaByte or GigaByte
(no terrapins!)
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:
This is a terrapin, it is a reptile which has a thick shell covering its body and which lives partly in water and partly on land. However it is completely useless at storing your digital images, crafty paper-kits, digital music. It is also not USB compatible, just look at the face he pulled when I suggested plugging him in!
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!