The Tribune

A few days ago I was busy cleaning my son’s laptop, discarding unused files, tidying up desktop folders, creating folders and fragmentation exercise etc.

It was quite a tedious task, as the entire laptop was covered with colourful short-cut icons and large media files,which resulted in his computer being slower than a turtle stampeding through a peanut butter factory.

Nonetheless, after checking storage availability, speed and transferring 80 per cent of the documents to a terabyte external drive, my niece, who was a spectator, was quite impressed with the transformation. She, too, has experienced the snail-like movement the laptop previously functioned on.

To cut a long story short, her curiosity peeked and she asked: “What is a Terabyte?” She received a brief ‘101 lecture’, which pointed me to my next article.

Storage and memory jargon can be complicated, since it is easy to confuse megabytes with gigabytes. Years ago, hard drive space was described in terms of Megabytes, but today Gigabytes is the more common term.

How much storage does each of these actually load? This is where it gets interesting, because there is more than one accepted explanation for each term. Let us start at the beginning.

It is easy to count the number of text messages or add up voice minutes. But how many megabytes does it take to download a photo? Or are you ever confused by how much memory and storage space your computer actually has?

The answers are not as straightforward as you would think, as there are several methods of expressing the storage space and memory of your computer. First, a brief and simplified math lesson.

Because computers are made from electrical components that are either on or off, they use a binary system for storage and memory.

The binary system has only two digits (0 and 1) that are used to express numerical values. For example, to get to the decimal number four in binary, you would count like this: 00, 01, 10, 11. If you want to go higher than that, you need more digits.

What’s all this about Bits and Bytes?

A bit is the smallest increment of storage on a computer. Imagine that each bit is like a light bulb. Each one is either on or off, so it can have one of two values (either 0 or 1).

So How Much Memory/Storage do I need?

The biggest reason why people become confused is that sometimes manufacturers provide information in decimals, and sometimes they provide it in binary. Hard drives, flash drives and other storage devices are usually labelled in decimal.

Memory (such as RAM) and software typically provide binary values. Since 1 Gigabyte in binary is bigger than 1 Gigabyte (GB) in decimal, the rest of us are often confused about how much space we are actually getting/using.

Worse, your computer may say it has an 80GB hard drive, but your operating system (which reports in binary) will tell you that it is actually less (by 7-8 GB). The easiest solution to this issue is to just ignore it as much as possible. Anybody confused yet?

When you purchase a storage device, simply remember that you are getting slightly less than you think, so plan accordingly. If you have 100 GB in files to store or software to install, you will need a hard drive with at least 110 GB of space. Here’s the Math:

Byte: A Byte is equal to 8 Bits and could be equal to one character. So it takes about 3 bytes to store the word ‘cat’. One hundred Bytes would easily equal an average sentence, and a 500-word essay can represent 3,000 bytes.

Kilobyte: A Kilobyte is approximately 1,000 Bytes; actually 1,024 Bytes, depending on which definition is used. One Kilobyte would be equal to this paragraph you are reading, whereas 100 Kilobytes would equal an entire page.

Megabyte: A Megabyte (MB) is approximately 1,000 Kilobytes. In the early days of computing, a Megabyte was considered to be a large amount of data. These days, with an 80 Gigabyte hard drive on a computer being common, a Megabyte does not seem like much any more.

Gigabyte: A Gigabyte is approximately 1,000 Megabytes, and is a very common term used these days when referring to disk space or drive storage. By and large, 1 Gigabyte of data is almost twice the amount of data that a CD-ROM can hold.

Terabyte: A Terabyte (TB) is around one trillion bytes, or 1,000 Gigabytes. Now we are getting up there to a size that is so large that it might not be a common term to some. To put it in some perspective, a Terabyte can hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images, or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video. That’s a lot of data.

Do you remember CD-ROMs? Way back before mp3 players and iPods and smartphones? Music was sold and purchased on plastic, laser-etched circles that would spin, and these discs were large enough to hold 700 MB. How does that compare to the 1 TB hard drives of today? You would need approximately 1,500 CD-ROMs to match the capacity of a 1 TB hard drive.

All things considered, it is easy to see that 500 gigabytes is more than 100 gigabytes. It is also easy to see that 1 Terabyte is larger than 1 Gigabyte, which is larger than 1 Megabyte. These are all abstract terms and names.

Still, technology has progressed and it is hard to really appreciate how much data capacity we have. But now you have a better understanding of Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes and everything in between. Until we meet again, fill your life with memories as opposed to regrets. Enjoy life and stay on top of your game.

• NB: The columnist welcomes feedback at deedee21bastian@gmail.com

ABOUT THE COLUMNIST: Deidre Marie Bastian is a professionally trained graphic designer/marketing coordinator with qualifications of M.Sc., B.Sc., A.Sc.

She has trained at institutions such as: Miami Lakes Technical Centre, Success Training College, College of the Bahamas, Nova South Eastern University, Learning Tree International, Langevine International and Synergy Bahamas.