1. INTRODUCTION
Here you will find a scale with the main information units and their equivalences (kB, MB, GB…).
I hope you find it useful.
2. MAIN INFORMATION UNITS (THE SCALE OF THE DIGITAL DATA)
INFORMATION UNIT | Â EQUIVALENCE |
Bit (b) | Basic information unit |
Byte (B) | 8 b |
Kilobyte (kB) | 1000 B |
Megabyte (MB) | 1000 kB |
Gigabyte (GB) | 1000 MB |
Terabyte (TB) | 1000 GB |
Petabyte (PB) | 1000 TB |
Exabyte (EB) | 1000 PB |
Zettabyte (ZB) | 1000 EB |
Yottabyte (YB) | 1000 ZB |
3. DAILY EXAMPLES (Equivalences with daily information units)
- 1 B: one letter.
- 1-10 B: one or two words.
- 50 B: a short sentence.
- 25 kB: an article as the one you’re reading (350 words + image + styling).
- 100-1000 kB: a phone picture.
- 1-4 MB: a pdf/epub book.
- 3-5 MB: a mp3 song.
- 10 MB: a 1 minute phone video (compressed)
- 100 MB: a 1 minute phone video in high resolution (not compressed).
- 3-100 MB: a phone app.
- 200 MB: this website (125 posts with images and other formats).
- 30 GB: the text of the English Wikipedia (6 million articles).
- 250 TB: all the media on Wikimedia Commons.
- 800 PB: all data generated in the world every minute.
- 40-50 ZB: the current world digital data.
4. REFERENCES
- Wikipedia.org (2020). Wikipedia: Size in volumes. Avaliable [HERE].
- Commons.wikimedia.org (2020). Media statistics. Avaliable [HERE].
- Domo.com (2020). Data never sleeps 6.0 > How much data is generated every minute?. Avaliable [HERE].
- Seagate.com (2020). The Digitization of the World > From Edge to Core. Avaliable [HERE].
- Nodegraph.se (2020). How much data is on the internet? The Big Data Facts Update 2020. Avaliable [HERE].
- Wikipedia.org (2020). Zettabyte. Avaliable [HERE].