Mega, Giga, what the ?
May 21 '00 (Updated Jan 20 '01)
The Bottom Line What size do I need? What the heck is a gigabyte anyway? How is the size measured and how can I make sense of this all?
When choosing a computer many people find themselves asking, "What does that mean?" more often than not. Speed talking sales people will give you the least amount of information to get you out the door. So when the question of what size hard drive should you get comes up many people are misled into believing that they need an extreme amount of space when in reality, they will never use it.
It is a good idea to get a larger hard drive if you plan on adding a lot of software to your computer, or if you have a lot of personal files like MP3 music files and photographs. The average user can get by with a 8 to 10GB hard drive. Some people will never use more than 3 or 4GB. Then people who do a lot of graphic artwork or record a lot of MP3 music will use over 30GB.
But what is a GB? GB stands for gigabyte which is roughly 1 billion bytes. The actual breakdown of terms for measuring the storage capacity of a disk or other media, and memory as well, starts with the bit. One bit of information is about (rough estimate here) the size of 1 or 2 text characters depending on the font and format you write in. A string of 4 bits in computer code is called a nybble.
Eight bits (or two nybbles) make 1 byte. This is the commonly used measurement for storage. 1024 bytes is a kilobyte (KB) and 1024 kilobytes is a megabyte (MB). Like wise, 1024 megabytes equals 1 gigabyte (GB). And although you may never see a drive with this capacity, 1024 gigabytes is equal to 1 terabyte (TB).
So when you buy a computer with a 27.2 GB hard drive and take it home to only play a few games and get your email, you probably are wasting 20 of those GBs. The best way to find out how big your drive must be is to figure out what you will be doing with your computer and more important, what you will be doing with it down the road. Even though wasting money on a drive you will never use half of really "bytes" it is better than running out of space in a year.
Also consider that Windows 95/98/NT all use a .SWP file which is used as virtual memory so that a percentage of your hard drive will always be inaccessible to you. This space is usually very small (like 256MB). If you have a 15GB hard drive you will only show it being 13.6 GB in Windows. The reason for this is because the disk has a partition that uses some of the space as well as being formatted, which also uses some of the disk space. Also, some disk manufacturers measure a GB as exactly 1,000MB which is not "exactly" accurate. When the manufacturer measures space this way, a 15GB hard drive will be short by 24MB times 15 totaling 360MB short to begin with.
I hope this helps a little in the confusing world of bits, bytes, and hard drives. Good luck with your drive.
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