Megabyte & Terabyte

A gigabyte commonly known by its abbreviation GB, is a unit of computer storage. 1GB equals 1024 Megabytes (MB) or one billion bytes (1,073,741,824). Hard drives storage capacity is measured in Gigabytes (eg. 80GB or 200GB). Computer memory is measured in megabytes and gigabytes (eg. 128MB (megabytes) or 1GB (gigabytes).

Other computer storages such as flash drives, and DVDs are measured in gigabytes. A common DVD holds 4.7GB, while Blu-ray disks can hold up to 25GB.

One common confusion with gigabytes is that most hard drive manufacturers say that 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, however operating systems and computer memory say that 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 x 1024 x 1024). This means a 400GB hard drive will only be recognized by the operating system as a 465GB. With hard drives becoming larger and larger all the time, this gap will increase. It will be interesting to see how this conflict works out.

A terabyte commonly known by its abbreviation TB, is a unit of computer storage. 1TB equals 1024 Gigabytes or one trillion bytes(1,099,511,627,776). Hard drives storage capacity is measured in Gigabytes (eg. 80GB or 200GB) and is just beginning to be measured in terabytes. Computer memory is measured in megabytes and gigabytes (eg. 128MB (megabytes) or 1GB (gigabytes).

One common confusion with terabytes is that most hard drive manufacturers say that 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, however operating systems and computer memory say that 1TB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes (1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024). 1 terabyte is a huge amount of room considering that 5 gigabytes was a big hard drive about five years ago.

Hopefully the table below will make clear how much a terabyte is actually worth.

1 Byte =	1 Byte	0.001 KB	0.000001 MB	0.000000001 GB
1 Kilobyte	1,000 Bytes	1 KB	0.001 MB	0.000001 GB
1 Megabyte	1,000,000 Bytes	1,000 KB	1 MB	0.001 GB
1 Gigabyte	1,000,000,000 Bytes	1,000,000 KB	1,000 MB	1 GB
1 Terabyte	1,000,000,000,000 Bytes	1,000,000,000 KB	1,000,000 MB	1,000 GB