What GB and MB actually mean
Look at “4.2 MB” or “256 GB” and have a genuine feel for how much that is.
A byte is roughly one letter of text. From there, every word up the ladder means about a thousand of the one below it.
Seeing them next to one another does more than any definition can.
Key points
- Each step up — KB, MB, GB, TB — is about a thousand times the one before
- A phone photograph is about 4 MB, so a gigabyte is about 250 of them
- Video is roughly a gigabyte every seven or eight minutes
- The space on a full disk nearly always comes back from a few enormous, replaceable things
What to remember
- Video is the one that catches everybody out. One minute of it is worth about thirty photographs.
- Notice which items were both enormous and replaceable. That is where nearly all reclaimed space comes from, on every machine.
- Writing is measured in kilobytes, pictures and music in megabytes, and anything that moves in gigabytes.
Try this
Find out how much room is left on your own machine. On Windows, open This PC and look under the C: drive. On a Mac, click the apple, choose About This Mac and look for Storage. If less than a tenth of it is free, that is worth attending to — and the last lesson of this course explains exactly why.
Practice: What GB and MB actually mean. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.