What are the current measurements of capacity in a computer?

Answer 1

Computer storage is usually measured in bytes. A byte is equal to 8 bits. A bit is a single piece of binary information (a 1 or a 0).

For example, if you have 16 ones and zeros of information, then that is 16 bits, or 2 bytes.

1,000 bytes is called a kilobyte; 1,000,000 bytes is called a megabyte, and 1,000,000,000 bytes is called a gigabyte. Today's computers store many billions of bytes, so these days you'll see a computer storage capacity measured in GB (gigabytes). For example, I have a computer at home with 500 GBs of storage. Therefore, it holds 5,000,000,000 bytes.

However, it gets confusing when the number of bytes in a kilobyte, or megabyte, etc. is calculated using powers of 2, which is historically how it has been done. Things like kilobyte, megabyte, etc. needed to be expressed as a multiple of 2. Therefore, a kilobyte, instead of being strictly 1,000, is 2^10 = 1,024 bytes. A megabyte is 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes. Therefore, let's say you have a disk that can hold 450,000,000 bytes. Using the binary definition of megabyte, that is 429.15 MB, and not 450 MB. This has led to consumer confusion, when someone buys a computer that claims 750 MB but Windows reports 715.256 MB.