January 06, 2004

Data Storage

I was looking for some basic definitions for network/data storage today to put in a newsletter and thought I would just put the info here... I'm not sure why.

  • bit: Short for binary digit. The smallest unit of information a computer can read and manipulate. The value of a bit is 1 or 0.
  • byte: The amount of memory space used to store one character; generally 8 bits.
  • kilobyte (KB): 1024 bytes.
  • megabyte (MB): 1,024 kilobytes
  • gigabyte (GB): 1,024 megabytes
  • terabyte (TB): 1024 gigabytes
  • petabyte (PB): 1024 terabytes
  • exabyte (EB: one billion gigabytes (one quintillion bytes)

Just think of how much music you could store on a 1 exabyte iPod...

Hmmmm ~10,000 songs fit on a 40 GB iPod. 1 exabyte = one billion gigabytes. ~250,000,000,000 songs would (theoretically) fit on a 1 exabyte iPod.

250 billion songs. Probably no space for commercials.

Do that many musical pieces even exist?

Posted by MEK at January 6, 2004 12:30 PM