Data units of measurement

A measure of the amount of information or storage capacity.
  • Bit. It is the minimum unit of information and is equivalent to a binary digit that can be 0 or 1.
  • Byte. It is an 8 bit set. It can contain one character and can take values ​​between 0 and 255.
  • Word. A word can have a variable number of bits depending on the computer system we are dealing with. In current computers it varies from 16 bits to 128 bits.
Measurement of transport speed or flow.
  • Bit/s. One bit transmitted every second.
  • Byte/s. One byte transmitted every second.
Multiples

Table of Prefixes of the International System of units.

Prefix Letter Amount 10^n
kilo- what 1,000 10^3
Mega- M 1,000,000 10^6
Jig- G 1,000,000,000 10^9
Tera- You 1,000,000,000,000 10^12
Peta- P 1,000,000,000,000,000 10^15
Exa- AND 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 10^18
Typical capacities and speeds
  • A text message will only occupy a few tens of bytes (a few bytes more than the number of characters or letters in the text).
  • An audio connection through Whatsapp needs about 60 kilobit/s to work.
  • A photo or mp3 song takes up a few hundred kilobytes or a few megabytes depending on its quality or size.
  • A fiber optic Internet connection has about 100 megabit/s connection speed (equivalent to about 12 megabyte/s).
  • An Ethernet connection to the router typically has a 1 gigabit/s connection speed (equivalent to 125 megabyte/s).
  • A DVD movie will take up 4 to 8 gigabytes of space.
  • A typical hard drive has a capacity of several terabytes.
  • A cluster of computers can reach several petabytes of capacity.
  • It is estimated that in 2020 the total storage capacity of the Internet was about 2000 exabytes.