UNITS OF STORAGE IN COMPUTER AND THEIR CONVERSION - COMPUTER.docx

Week 5
UNITS OF STORAGE IN COMPUTER
AND THEIR CONVERSIONS
The Units of Storage
Storage is the place where data are held in an electromagnetic or optical
form for access by a computer processor.
Computer system whether desktops, laptops or supercomputers store
information in the form of binary numeral system (0’s and 1’s)
The various units of storage in computer science are the means of
representing, storing and measuring data and information in the computer.
It is largely about the memories, and it ranges from the small capacity units
such as BIT to the big capacity units such as PETABYTE.




UNITS OF STORAGE IN COMPUTER
AND THEIR VALUES

, The units of storage in computer include the following:
1. Bit = either 0 or 1 (Binary digit)
2. Byte = 8 bits = 2 Nibble
3. Nibble = 4 bits = half byte
4. Word = 16 bits = 2 bytes
5. Double Word = 32 bits = 2 words
6. Quad Word = 64 bits = 8 bytes
7. Kilobyte (KB) = 1024 bytes
8. Megabyte (MB) = (1024)2 = 1,048,576 bytes
9. Gigabyte (GB) = (1024)3 = 1,073,741,824 bytes
10. Terabyte (TB) = (1024)4 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
11. Petabyte (PB) = (1024)5 = 1,125,899,906,842,624
bytes




UNITS OF STORAGE
AND
THEIR VALUES
UNIT ABBRE. EXACT EQUIVALENT APPROXIMATION SIZE