Units of storage

1. Introduction to data sizes

Bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and petatbytes are all used to describe disk space, data storage or the capacity of system memory.

The picture below shows how each size is related to the others.

You need to be able to define each of these different sizes and to place them into the correct order from smallest to largest.

You should also to be able to identify the most suitable storage capacity for a given scenario.

This section also explains why data needs to be converted into binary format to be processed.