If you are not yet confused about the terms byte, kilobyte etc. here is something that might complete your confusion.
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To properly explain this we need to go right back to basics and describe bytes, part of the gigabyte unit we associate with hard drive size. A byte is a unit of measure used in electronic information storage. A byte is made up of 8 smaller bits of data. 1 bit is a single binary digit represented by either a 1 or a 0. In this way, a byte (8 bits) can represent 256 different values.
Rather than the kilo, mega and giga prefixes we use referring to a thousand, million, or billion bytes, the binary counting system means that what we call a kilobyte (KB) is actually 1024 bytes, 1024 kilobytes make a megabyte (MB), and 1024 megabytes form a gigabyte (GB) etc. They are all multiples of 256. This is all fine and dandy except that hard drive manufacturers prefer decimal numbers. This means that they class 1000 bytes as a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes is a megabyte and so on. This may not see like a big deal initially; and it isn’t until you start to get into the big numbers like the hard drives of today. As a working example we’ll take a 500GB hard drive... When your computer reads it, there are indeed 500,000,000,000 bytes but when you convert that to a binary figure, you’ll find there are only about 465GB.
To clarify this discrepancy the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) introduced a new prefix in 1999. All binary values are now called kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte etc. so we can differentiate between them and the decimal values.
From Serif Newsletter, June 2009.
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To properly explain this we need to go right back to basics and describe bytes, part of the gigabyte unit we associate with hard drive size. A byte is a unit of measure used in electronic information storage. A byte is made up of 8 smaller bits of data. 1 bit is a single binary digit represented by either a 1 or a 0. In this way, a byte (8 bits) can represent 256 different values.
Rather than the kilo, mega and giga prefixes we use referring to a thousand, million, or billion bytes, the binary counting system means that what we call a kilobyte (KB) is actually 1024 bytes, 1024 kilobytes make a megabyte (MB), and 1024 megabytes form a gigabyte (GB) etc. They are all multiples of 256. This is all fine and dandy except that hard drive manufacturers prefer decimal numbers. This means that they class 1000 bytes as a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes is a megabyte and so on. This may not see like a big deal initially; and it isn’t until you start to get into the big numbers like the hard drives of today. As a working example we’ll take a 500GB hard drive... When your computer reads it, there are indeed 500,000,000,000 bytes but when you convert that to a binary figure, you’ll find there are only about 465GB.
To clarify this discrepancy the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) introduced a new prefix in 1999. All binary values are now called kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte etc. so we can differentiate between them and the decimal values.
From Serif Newsletter, June 2009.
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