3c Units of Information

  • Know that a bit is the fundamental unit of information
  • Know that a byte is eight bits
  • Know that quantities of bytes can be described using prefixes.
  • Know the names, symbols and corresponding values for the decimal prefixes: kilo, mega, giga, tera

Units

  • Smallest unit is a bit
  • 1 byte = 8 bits
Unit ​No. of Bytes
Kilobyte (KB) 10³ 1,000 bytes
Megabyte (MB) 10⁶ 1,000,000 bytes
Gigabyte (GB)  10⁹ 1,000,000,000 bytes
Terabyte (TB) 10¹² 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Petabyte (PB) 10¹⁵  1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Units

Unit ​No. of Bytes
Kilobyte (KB) 10³ 1,000 bytes
Megabyte (MB) 10⁶ 1,000,000 bytes
Gigabyte (GB)  10⁹ 1,000,000,000 bytes
Terabyte (TB) 10¹² 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Petabyte (PB) 10¹⁵  1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
  1. Convert the following numbers
    1. 4,800MB into GB
    2. 800TB into GB
  2. How big is a typical photograph file taken from a mobile phone camera?
  3. What is the average capacity of a hard disk or SSD on a computer?

Units Assessment

  1. Name the smallest measure of data.
  2. How many kilobytes are in 1 megabyte?
  3. Arrange the following units of data in order from smallest to largest:
        terabyte        byte        gigabyte        megabyte
  4. Calculate the number of megabytes in 15 terabytes.
  5. A DVD has 300 000 kilobytes of data on it. How many gigabytes of data is this?
  6. May has 3 identical files that have a combined size of 2.1 terabytes. How big is each file in gigabytes?
  7. Andrew has an external hard drive that can store 500 gigabytes of data. How many 10 000 megabyte videos can he store on the external hard drive?

Units Answers I

  1. Name the smallest measure of data.
    A bit
  2. How many kilobytes are in 1 megabyte?
    1000
  3. Arrange the following units of data in order from smallest to largest:
        terabyte        byte        gigabyte        megabyte
        byte        megabyte        gigabyte       terabyte
  4. Calculate the number of megabytes in 15 terabytes.
    15 000 000 MB

Units Answers II

  1. A DVD has 300 000 kilobytes of data on it. How many gigabytes of data is this?
    0.3 GB
  2. May has 3 identical files that have a combined size of 2.1 terabytes. How big is each file in gigabytes?
    700 GB
  3. Andrew has an external hard drive that can store 500 gigabytes of data. How many 10 000 megabyte videos can he store on the external hard drive?
    50 videos

3c Units of Information

By David James

3c Units of Information

Computer Science - Fundamentals of Data Representation - Units of Information

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