【Informatics Units】What are they and what are they for? ▷ 2022

How many times have you not heard of Bits, Bytes, Megas, Gigas? Surely a lot, so you may have been left wondering what this is. The aforementioned is part of the Computer Science Units, which are nothing more than methods that allow us to explain the different sizes existing in the digital world.

These measures can be grouped into 3, which would be storage to measure the space that information occupies on the disk. the one of prosecution to calculate the processing speed of a processor, and that of data transmission which measures the time it takes a server to put the data packet on the line to send.

For many it is a confusing topic, and this is given by all that exist and by the use that is given to each one. For this reason, we have prepared this small article in order to explain a little what they are and the easiest way to relate and interpret them.

What is and what is a computer measurement unit used for?

These are nothing more than the expressions that are used to know the capacity that our equipment has when saving a file. We must bear in mind that these units are not measures of weight as many people believe, but rather are measures of length. As actually this tells us how long it is and what it occupies in space of the unit. Reason why these are calculable by their length.

With them we can obtain data on the storage unit, capacity of memory cards, flash drives and everything that is used to store. But you should know that they are not only used for this, but in the same way They are used to measure your Internet speed and RAM memories.

In conclusion, they serve to quantify and know the size that a file covers on our computer, to calculate the storage and data processing capacity of the information.

In computer storage units, the same magnitudes are also applied as in physical measurement units, as they are kilo, mega, giga or tera; each one equals one thousand units of the previous one.

What are the main units of measurement that we use in computing?

in computing three essential units are known to measure information, which are the bit, the byte and the hertz. The first two are used to measure space or volume, while the second is a processing speed factor:

Bit

The bit stands for binary digit and corresponds to the smallest unit of information on a piece of equipment. This has a value that can be 0 or 1, and with it an infinite number of binary conditions can be represented that could be on and off, true and false, present and absent. Usually these are handled to describe transmission speeds.

The bit sizes are as follows:

• kilobit; which equals 1000 bits.
• Megabit; which is equal to 1000 kilobits.
• Gigabit; which is equal to 1000 megabits.

Byte

The byte corresponds to the union of 8 consecutive Bits, so this is considered a combination of the first. It should be noted that with it you can achieve up to 256 conjugations, being enough to represent the entire alphabet, punctuation marks, numbers and more. Namely, each character that is entered into a computer is a byte, following the equivalences of the ASCII code.

Example, a document that has 1000 characters will occupy 1000 bytes. So it is said that the more bytes you have, the more space will be needed to store it.

The most important magnitudes of this unit are:

• Kilobyte; which equals 1000 bytes.
• Megabyte; which is equal to 1000 kilobytes.
• gigabytes; which equals 1000 megabytes.
• Terabytes; which is equal to 1000 gigabytes

We will explain the relationship between these in an easy way so that you do not get complicated. Let’s imagine this.

We have a large book and a single letter of it corresponds to a Byte, it is made up of eight parts where each one is called a Bit. At the moment of putting all those Bytes together, we would form words and with it a paragraph, which would then count as a Kilobyte.

With these Kilobytes we would form the pages and this would represent a Megabyte. So the complete book would be considered a Gigabyte, but if we join this to other books within a library, it would already be equivalent to a Terabyte.

easier to understand certain?

hertz

Finally there are hertz, which is used to measure the speed of information processing. One hertz is the equivalent of one cycle. that is to say, something that is repeated once, such as the turns of a processor in a certain space of time. That being said, you can talk about hertz per second, minute, and even hours.

For example, the thin hand of a clock rotates at 1 hertz per minute, while the longer one rotates at 1hz per hour, and the smaller one rotates once a day.

To simplify, hertz also have their magnitudes as they are:

• kilohertz; which equals 1000Hz.
• megahertz; which is equivalent to 1000Khz.
• gigahertz; which is equivalent to 1000Mhz.
• Terahertz; which is equivalent to 1000Ghz.