What Is GB on Flash Drives?
GB, computer shorthand for gigabyte, denotes the information--carrying capacity of flash drives and other media: hard drives, optical discs like DVDs and random-access memory (RAM) sticks. To understand a gigabyte, you have to begin more than a billion bytes earlier, with a single bit.
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A Bit
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The lowly bit--a contraction of the words binary and digit--is the most basic, irreducible unit of computer information. A binary value, it exists only as a 1 or a 0.
A Byte
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Eight bits make up a byte, which usually represents a single character in text.
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Byte Prefixes
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Different prefixes multiply the number of bytes. Kilo, for instance, represents a thousand, so a kilobyte equals 1,000 bytes, or 1 kbyte or 1 kB (k for kilo is lowercased to avoid confusion with the capitalized K for kelvin temperature measurement). A thousand kilobytes--1 million bytes--is 1 megabyte, Mbyte or MB. Continuing, a thousand megabytes--1 billion bytes--is 1 gigabyte, Gbyte or GB. It's also 8 billion bits, or 8 Gb (note the lowercased b for bit). Next? Here comes tera, for trillion.
Other File Measurements
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On the road to a billion-byte (GB) world, other file measurements like the kilobyte (kB) and megabyte (MB) still make an appearance. Though gigameasures are slowly becoming coin of the realm, some capacities---RAM, for example---continue to be expressed in megameasures. Thus, if you see a 1,024-MB memory spec, you're in fact looking at 1-GB RAM.
How Many Files?
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You can compare other file measurements to a flash drive's gigabytes of storage space to determine the approximate percentage of the drive's capacity a file will take. Since 1 GB equals about 1,000 MB, you could fit roughly 1,000 files of 1 MB each.
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