​Digital Summer Camp 08: The Language of File Sizes

​Gigs, megs, kilobytes, megapixels…omg, wth? If you’ve ever gone to upload a file and been shocked by how long it’s taking then never fear! Today’s episode is all about file sizes. I’ll cover all of the common ones, a few exotic ones and even reveal the name of one you might use every day without knowing what it actually means!

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A post shared by Ame Stanko (@pixellava) on Aug 29, 2018 at 2:44pm PDT

• KBs and MBs and GBs
  KB stands for kilobytes and while kilo means 1000, there are actually 1024* KBs in a megabyte. If you’re old enough to remember the 90’s, the last version of floppy disks were around 700 KB (anyone remember the two sided ones you could flip over?!)
• MB stands for megabyte and there are 1024 MBs in a Gigabyte. With more powerful computers, bigger hard drives and faster internet, MBs are now the most common file size unit.
• GB stands for gigabyte and at 1024 GBs in a terabyte. A downloaded movie is usually many GBs and video on your smart phone can quickly fill up your memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
• TB = 1024 GBs TBs in a PB. A terabyte of video is uploaded to YouTube every four minutes.
• PB = petabyte and there are 1024 PB in an EB (not to be confused with a petaflop, which is is a value of Floating Point Operations per Second). The CERN Large Hadron Collider generates 1 petabyte per second.
• EB = Exabyte and there are 1024 in a ZB. The proposed Square Kilometer Array telescope will generate an exabyte of data per day. (https://gigaom.com/2012/10/30/as-data-gets-bigger-what-comes-after-a-yottabyte/)

 
ZBs, YBs, BBs and more = ZB stands for zettabyte and there are 1024 in a YB or yottabyte. What comes after that? Brontobytes are 1027 and gegobytes are 1030 but the mother of them all is the googol. That’s right, Google is named after the googol, aka googolplex, which is 10100. That might sound tidy, but famed astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that “writing a googolplex in full decimal form (i.e., "10,000,000,000...") would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than is available in the known universe.” 

Where to use:
KB: website images are usually 500-1000 kilobyte. As a comparison, a typical Word doc is around 200k. These are fine for emailing.
MB: A typical pdf file or mp3 is around 3 MBs. This can be readily emailed, but most email programs will force you to use some other method of sending like Google Drive or DropBox for files over 30 mbs.
GB: No emailing here, files this big need to be sent using services like DropBox or provided on a Flash drive.
TB: you might have a back up hard drive that’s a few TBs but you’ll likely not work with files this size (at least for the time being!).
 
*Why 1024 instead of simply 1000? Decimals are based on powers of 10 whereas binary numbers are based on the base 2 (binary = 2). The notion of using kilo for 1024 is a compromise between the literal decimal meaning which is widely understood linguistically and the mathematical definition.

That's it for my 8 Week Digital Summer Camp online learning series! I hope you've enjoyed watching these little videos as much as I've enjoyed making them. To get cool future videos like this delivered straight to your In Box, join my mailing list.