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The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as a multiplication factor of 1000 (10 3); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. [1] The internationally recommended unit symbol for the kilobyte is kB. [1]
The ISQ symbols for the bit and byte are bit and B, respectively.In the context of data-rate units, one byte consists of 8 bits, and is synonymous with the unit octet.The abbreviation bps is often used to mean bit/s, so that when a 1 Mbps connection is advertised, it usually means that the maximum achievable bandwidth is 1 Mbit/s (one million bits per second), which is 0.125 MB/s (megabyte per ...
bit: 10 0: bit 1 bit – 0 or 1, false or true, Low or High (a.k.a. unibit) 1.442695 bits (log 2 e) – approximate size of a nat (a unit of information based on natural logarithms) 1.5849625 bits (log 2 3) – approximate size of a trit (a base-3 digit) 2 1: 2 bits – a crumb (a.k.a. dibit) enough to uniquely identify one base pair of DNA
For communication throughput, a base unit of bit is common. For example, using the metric kilo prefix, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes and a kilobit is 1000 bits. Use of metric prefixes is common, but often inaccurate since binary storage hardware is organized with capacity that is a power of 2 – not 10 as the metric prefixes are.
To resolve this difficulty, IEC 80000-13 clarifies that a gigabyte (GB) is 10 9 bytes and specifies the term gibibyte (GiB) to denote 2 30 bytes. These differences are still readily seen, for example, when a 400 GB drive's capacity is displayed by Microsoft Windows as 372 GB instead of 372 GiB.
On the other hand, a hard disk whose capacity is specified by the manufacturer as "10 gigabytes" or "10 GB", holds 10 × 10 9 = 10 000 000 000 bytes, or a little more than that, but less than 10 × 2 30 = 10 737 418 240 and a file whose size is listed as "2.3 GB" may have a size closer to 2.3 × 2 30 ≈ 2 470 000 000 or to 2.3 × 10 9 = 2 300 ...
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.
The International System of Units defines a series of decimal prefixes for multiples of standardized units which are commonly also used with the bit and the byte. The prefixes kilo (10 3) through yotta (10 24) increment by multiples of one thousand, and the corresponding units are the kilobit (kbit) through the yottabit (Ybit).