What is the difference between bytes

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You're not alone. Vote for what to update first in our poll. There is one exception to this, of course, and it is the symbol for kilobit, which is 'kb', all lowercase. But these file sizes are so small nowadays that you shouldn't really see much of them. It's easy to figure out based on common sense: an uppercase 'B' is physically larger than a lowercase 'b', and a byte is larger than a bit.

While there's a range of different file sizes, most of us only need to know a few different prefixes. Here are the most common ones. A megabyte MB is 1, kilobytes. A gigabyte GB is 1, megabytes. A terabyte TB is 1, gigabytes. A megabit Mb is 1, kilobits. A gigabit Gb is 1, megabits. A terabit Tb is 1, gigabits. Compared to the traditional SI nomenclature, where the subsequently-larger prefixes are defined in terms of multiples of , computers use multiples of because it is more natural in terms of the binary number system, being 2 10 in binary.

A bit is the smallest unit of data that can be represented in computers. Using a bit , a maximum of 2 values can be represented. In many computer architectures, a byte forms the smallest addressable unit of memory.

In these systems, the minimum size that a variable can hold is 1 byte. About the Author: Nipun. View all posts. This is much faster than a dial-up modem, which maxes out at 56Kbps.

Bytes, on the other hand, are used to measure data storage. The other important difference is that bytes contain eight bits of data. Therefore, a Kbps download is only transferring 30KB of data per second.