Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The IT's Extra Byte

Not too long ago, every one of us marvelled at our ability to store information on devices that boasted of a storage capacity of 64 megabytes.

Then came 128 megabytes…WOW! Now, no one would dream of buying a thumb drive with less then 512 MB and we turn our noses up at PCs and laptops that promise less than 80 gigabytes.

A megabyte (MB) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to approximately one million bytes, or 1,0002, 106, or 1,048,576 bytes in decimal notation. Well, no one's complaining and the zero's continue adding up.

Today, everyone is talking about storage on phones, cameras and PDAs of 1 Gigabyte which is 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 10243.

For those who can’t get enough of gigabytes, they should be happy (for now) with the Terabyte or the TB.

The TB which gets its prefix "tera" from a Greek word meaning 'monster' tells you this will chomp on all your digital data quite easily in one swift move. This is indeed a giant leap ahead.
Google reportedly maintains some 1.8 petabytes of storage right now.

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