1000 or 1024? How many megabytes in gigabyte?

Computer technology is already so tightentered the lives of ordinary citizens, which probably nowadays almost everyone knows how many megabytes in a gigabyte. Anyway, he thinks he knows. Hearing the right answer to this seemingly elementary and childish question is not brought so often. With all this, the answers are always different.

What is megabyte and gigabyte?

Nowadays, it’s quite difficult to find people whowould not know what these two words mean - megabyte and gigabyte. These terms are used in the computer world specifically to describe the space required to store files, or the capacity of any drive.

At the moment gigabyte is the mosta common term that is very often used to describe the size of both movies or computer games, as well as a hard disk or RAM. Although in a short time the term terabyte may oust the most common computer concept of today from habitual use, it is quite possible that soon it will not necessarily be necessary to know how many megabytes are in a gigabyte.

Do I need to know the number of megabytes in a gigabyte?

Мало кто будет спорить с утверждением, что You can use a personal computer without knowing how many megabytes in a gigabyte. However, judge for yourself: nowadays almost every schoolchild knows the elementary units for measuring computer information volumes: it is not for nothing that computer science lessons take place.

Ежедневно все мы сталкиваемся с битами, байтами, kilobytes and other units of measurement of computer information, because with their help we can measure the operational or internal memory of devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, flash cards, MP3 players and others.

Internet users are almost alwaysdeal with megabytes and gigabytes, especially if they download any program, audio recording or movie to their personal computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Knowing how much this or that file downloaded from the Internet takes is extremely important, since with this knowledge you can understand how long a song, movie or computer game will load and whether there is enough free space on the flash drive for that.

So how many gigabytes megabytes?

Initially it may seem that convertmegabytes to gigabytes is very simple. Surely, each of us since the time of school remembers that “giga” means a billion, while “mega” means a million. Hence the answer to the question of how much A megabyte in one gigabyte would seem logical.To convert from megabytes to gigabytes, you just need to multiply the number by a thousand, and the result will not be long in coming. But it was not there. The gigabyte is not 1000 megabytes, as the absolute majority believes, but 1024.

Why not 1000?

As you know, absolutely all computersfunction in the binary number system, that is, when their work uses only two digits - 0 and 1. In turn, the unit of information that can take the value 0 or 1, is called a bit. Soon there was a byte, which includes 8 bits. As time went on, technology improved, and over time it became clear that the byte was still very small, and to measure the information, larger units of measurement were needed.

В скором времени вспомнили о международной measurement system However, in computer science it was much more convenient to measure the values ​​by powers of two, so together 1000 it was decided to choose the number 1024, because it is 10 degree of the number 2. After that, the binary "kilo" became equal to 1024. Based on the above, it is possible to state megabyte in gigabyte - 1024.