Computer Data Storage Measures

Computers have a very elementary way to store data: they can remember only 0 or 1. A value of 0 or 1 is called bit and all computer data are stored as sequences of bits. A sequence of 8 bits is called a byte, which is a quantity large enough to store usually a letter or a digit (even though sometimes 2 bytes are necessary).

Modern computers are able to deal with enormous quantity of bytes, forcing us to introduce other quantities:

• Kilobyte (KB), approximately 1,000 bytes,
• Megabyte (MB), approximately 1,000 KB or one million bytes,
• Gigabyte (GB), approximately 1,000 MB or one billion bytes,
• Terabyte (TB), approximately 1,000 GB or one trillion bytes.

Usually the unformatted text of a whole book can fit in some KB, while for an image in a good resolution (let’s say ready to be printed on A4 paper) or for a modern song some MB are required, while a film in high quality needs some GB

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