Memory Help!

[Spudnik]

Chaps,

My brain is fried and i need to know how many Megabytes in a Gigabyte.

Dont laugh, its been a long day!

Or better still, how many megabytes in 500 gigabytes.

 

[mnmwill]

1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte

 

[chris gray]

unless your american then its 100mb = 1gb

 

[mnmwill]

unless your american then its 100mb = 1gb

No, i'm definately not American, and its definately 1000 mb = 1gb

 

[Spudnik]

Thanks fellas.

I was trying to set up my NAS and it asks for megabytes even thought the disk in gigabytes.

So i plumped for 300000 megabytes and it worked

Ta again

 

[rocker]

Strictly speaking on hard drives I think it's often 1024, but I may have just made that up cos I don't remember why.

 

[pennywise]

My old man has just procured 10 units with a petabyte of storage space each, could store a few films

 

[mnmwill]

Strictly speaking on hard drives I think it's often 1024, but I may have just made that up cos I don't remember why.

I think that you may be referring to RAM, which is actually 1024mb, but they call it a gig.

 

[rocker]

O yea because it has to me multiples of 8 or something

 

[Doomed]

Both right and wrong
Officially there are 1000 MB in 1 GB
However, in a throughback to the early days of 8 bits in a byte (due to the early processors [which I built custom made flow control computers with]) alot of manufacturers still use 1024 MB in a GB
However, when you format a hard drive of this sort of size you will always end up with less space then you would expect due to the formatting process.

 

[UNG]

I always thought the 1024 came from the fact that computers work on the binary system of 1's and 0's

 

[Doomed]

8 bit processing was a series of 8 1' and 0's so yes, sort of.

 

[topquark]

I always thought the 1024 came from the fact that computers work on the binary system of 1's and 0's

That's coz it does

In binary you end up with the following units (powers of 2), instead of 1's 10's 100's etc

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096 8192 16384 32768 65536 (64k) etc

So when dealing with storage allocation (as opposed to hard disk manufacturer size claims) you end up with 1k=1024, 1m=1024k, 1g=1024m.

Hard disk manufacturers tend to use 100, 1000 etc when quoting sizes for the disk drives, the OS however will still allocate in a number of sectors (usually 512bytes for most pc's, but some other systems use other sizes eg IBM's i5/OS uses 528 byte sectors). As already said formatting the disk will reduce the amount of space available for user data (used for file allocation table/indexes/journals etc).

 

[JUD]

Chaps,

My brain is fried and i need to know how many Megabytes in a Gigabyte.

Dont laugh, its been a long day!

Or better still, how many megabytes in 500 gigabytes.

If you're setting it through Windows 500 Gigabytes = 512000 Megabytes