Measuring data and storage

A computer process digital data. When you use an input device the signal from the device are converted into a steam of bits the smallest componnents of computer data. Each bit can be in one of two states 1 or 0 with the 1 standing for On and the 0 stand for Off.


Memery and the disks are the components used to store data for processing. The unit used to messure data are bits , bytes , megabytes and gigabytes.

• Bits are combined with sets of eight to form charactors such as letters from the alpherbet. For a example 01000001 is used torepresent the letters A in binary code. This group of eight bits makes a byte.

• A killobyte (KB) is 1024 bytes. The size of a data file is often measured in killobyte.

• A megabyte (MB) is often used to measure the storage capacity of a disk or the amount of main memary. The totall size of a collection of files within a folder may be messured in megabyte. A megabyte is 1048576 bytes. 1 MB is about as much data as 500 pages of double spaced text.

• A gigabyte (GB) is equivalent to 1024 MB. The memary capacity of a many larger storage devices such as hard drive is messured in gigabytes. 

• A terabyte (TB) is equivalent to 1024 GB.