Whether it’s file sizes, download speeds or a hard drives storage, terms such as megabits, megabytes and terabytes are thrown around a lot. In this article I aim to help people understand these confusing terms, and mention some of the common misconception people fall under.

One the biggest things some people can be confused by is their Internet speed. Upload, download, kilobits, bytes, there are a lot of terms used. The most common term is Mbps. This can be broken up into 4 simple parts. Mega bits per second. Note the lower case “b”, indicating bits rather than bytes. With the average UK Internet download speed being 10.5 Mbps, why does it take so long to download a 100 MB file? Surely it should take around 10 seconds?The key difference here is the upper case “B”. This stands for byte, not bit. A byte is a a simple term for 8 bits. If (for easy math) we take an Internet connection of 8Mbps, and try to download an 8 MB file, some might think it would take 1 second. This is a common misconception, often making people think they are not getting the speeds they were promised. Because it is 8 MB, it is 8 times larger than 8 Mb. Since 8Mbps is equal to 1MBps, an 8MB file would take a total of 8 second to download. The issue here is the term Mega byte used. When your download speed it less than 1MBps (or 8Mbps), browsers often show the speed in kbps. This stands for kilo bits per second. “Kilo” is known by many from kilograms or kilometres, meaning 1000. In computers, this strictly means 1024 (Although not always, as discussed later). Megabit is the next level up from Kilobit, and simply means 1024 x 1024 bits, making a total of 1,048,576 bits. With each bit being either a 0 or 1, that’s a lot of 0′s and 1′s. This can then be taken to another level, Gigabits, meaning 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bits. This goes on for quite some time.

Such large scales bring me onto some of the largest amounts of computer numbers you will realistically deal with, storage. All computer have some form of storage, no matter how small, often the form of a HDD (Hard Disk Drive). These are often described with the unit GigaBytes, often with hundreds of GB. This is clearly a huge scale of storage, a number of bits most people couldn’t comprehend without the use of the GigaBytes. This is one of (if not the) main reason we use there various scales of units. It’s almost like trying to measure the Empire State Building in Millimetres. However, most HDD’s are often not actually measured in the GB we have learned, many will assume “kilo” and “giga” to mean 1000, and when using this to calculate the total storage in GB or TB, you can loose a lot of storage space.  Although this relativly small number, 24, taken off may not seem huge, when you’re using a 1TB (1 TeraByte, 1GB x 1024) HDD, it can add up. This simple round down shaves off around 80GB off your shiny new 1TB HDD. That’s a fairly significant chunk of data.