How many KB are in an MB?
Computer enthusiasts, programmers, engineers … anyone who has a little love for a digital machine knows that information flows through the memories encoded in “ones” and “zeros.” Each of these digits is a “bit” and they are not sorted according to a decimal scheme. Eight of these bits form a Byte and 1024 of these Bytes form a KiloByte – a short, kB. 1024 kB make a MegaByte –MB, abbreviated-, 1024 MB make 1 GigaByte –GB- and so we could continue all morning.
But coffee time, cigar or cane time is approaching and it is not a matter of prolonging this more than the inevitable. Just know that, in the beginning, this compartmentalization was not so rigid. The first binary machines ordered the information in packages of five bits or 12 bits or those that were necessary to encode the characters of the alphabet that the user needed. At one point, around the 1960s, the engineers agreed – it does not happen very often – and decided that grouping them eight by eight worked better and worked great with the eight-bit microprocessors that were all the rage at the time.
Forty years later, however, everyone does what they want. To begin, nobody writes the capacities and transmission speeds following the established “norm”. For example, a kB should go with the lowercase k – for strange reasons that none of my algorithmic teachers could ever explain to me – and the B in uppercase – because it refers to a “Byte”, not a “bit”. An MB, on the other hand, is written with both uppercase. Unless we talk about transmission speeds. The famous ADSL of 20 “megabytes” is actually a connection that theoretically reaches 20 Mb per second, that is Mega “bits”, so you have to divide by eight to calculate the MB per second.
At the moment of truth, each one writes it by putting the upper and lower case letters where he wants and leaves the reader free interpretation of what he reads. I found hard disk boxes in which capacities of 80 GB were announced – well, both in lowercase – although they really have 80 GB, which is eight times more than announced.
To some extent it is acceptable and I even confess that I write it according to the mood I have that day. Common sense tells us that in storage products the capacity is measured in bytes and that of transmission in bits. No matter how you express yourself, it is easy to know what measure you are talking about.
The problem comes when some companies unilaterally decide to change the values associated with the prefixes. One GB is 1024 MB, but what if a company decides they are only 1,000? This is what the manufacturer of hard drives Seagate has done, which for six years considers that a KB is 1,000B here, in Beijing or in Namibia. A court ruling now says that the company is obliged to return 5% of the money that has been pocketed with hard drives that did not specify that deviation from the norm.
However, other manufacturers of hard drives – Samsung or Hitachi, for example – also use this table of different measures and with which consumers have lost, although no court has condemned them to return anything. There are processes open for this issue to virtually all memory or disk manufacturers – SanDisk, Kingston, … – and in a 1 TB disk the difference is considerable, 10% of the space nothing less … What do we do?
The step that we are going to measure in “soccer fields” will be considered international standard of length soon so we could take advantage of and create a new standard for storage capacity. Create it, if possible, before the English unilaterally decide to use “byte pints” -o ptB-, “pounds of bits” -lbb- or binary ounces -BiOz-. Now it is fashionable to give the number of songs, photos or videos that fit approximately on a hard disk maybe we should make it the official measure. My computer has capacity for 200 hours of video -160 GB in which one kB is equivalent to 1000 Bytes- and yours? Make the accounts …
