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Windows sees a 250GB hard drive as 232GB, and a 1TB drive as 931GB. This means that 1000 Bytes = 1 kiloByte and 1000 kiloBytes = 1MB.
Linux uses decimal these days, while Windows 10 uses power-of-two units.
Some say it's a clever marketing ploy, but whatever the reason, it makes for some confusion depending upon which operating system you connect it to. Hard drive manufacturers have long eschewed the power-of-two system for the power of ten. Terabyte (TB): There are 1024GB in one terabyte (TB) Why your hard drive has a lower capacity than advertised Gigabyte (GB): There are 1024MB in one gigabyte. Megabyte (MB): 1024KB equals one megabyte (MB). Therefore 1KB is the same as 1024 x 8 = 8192 binary digits.
Kilobyte (kB): The smallest file stored on a smartphone, tablet or PC is typically four kilobytes (4KB) in size. A bit can be 0 or 1, equivalent or off or on.īyte: One byte is eight binary digits, such as 1111001.
Here's a more detailed explanation, with examples.īit: Computers deal with binary digits, or bits for short. However, most people still use Megabytes to mean 1024 kiloBytes even if they really should say MibiBytes, and the same with GB and TB.Ĭomputers work using the power of two, not the power of 10, because they're binary machines, which is why the power-of-two should be applied to computers (and phones, tablets and any other electronic gadget). That's why you'll see kilobytes referred to as kibibytes and Megabytes as mibibytes in order to differentiate them. This means there are two different approaches to quantifying storage, one which uses the power-of-two (shown above) and the other which uses the power-of-ten which makes 1KB = 1000 Bytes. Note: this doesn't cover SI units, which work on the basis that kilo means 1000. External hard drives and network attached storage (NAS) might have a similar capacity or even thousands of gigabytes, which are called terabytes (TB). The hard drive in your PC or laptop will probably have hundreds of gigabytes. That's why the amount of memory is much smaller - a phone might have 128GB of storage but only 4GB of memory (RAM). Memory, or RAM, is there only to store files and data temporarily while they're being used. Your phone will have a number of gigabytes in which to store apps, music, contacts, emails, messages, photos, videos and more.ĭon't confuse storage with memory. What's a megabyte?Ĭomputer storage is measured in gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB), among other units. Read on and you'll find out why, as well as how to convert between MB, GB, TB and the difference between megabytes and megabits. Things get complicated by the fact that some manufacturers play fast and loose with their conversions, so you might find your 500GB drive doesn't actually have 512000MB of usable storage. These are all storage capacities and can refer to memory ( RAM) or hard drives and SSDs (solid-state storage).
If you want to know more there are 1024 gigabytes in a terabyte (TB) and 1024 terabytes in one petabyte (PB). If you literally just want the answer to the question you just asked, there are 1024MB (megabytes) in one GB (gigabyte).