Size Matters – How Computer Storage Works

Have you ever heard the term ‘gigabyte’ and had no idea what it meant?

Well wonder no longer, today we’re going to explain computer storage!

Computers measure data in ‘bytes’ the same way that we measure weight in grams or length in metres.

A megabyte (MB) is 1,024 kilobytes (KB).

A gigabyte (GB) is 1,024 megabytes (MB).

A terabyte (TB) is 1,024 gigabytes (GB).

There are bigger and smaller sizes, but we don’t really need to worry about those in 2025.

But what does a megabyte, gigabyte or a terabyte actually look like in practice?

Here are some examples:

A Document is about 50 kilobytes.

A Photo is about 3 megabytes.

A Song is about 20 megabytes.

A Movie is about 5 gigabytes.

A Game is about 100 gigabytes.

You might remember the old 3.5” floppy disks from the 1980s, well they could hold 1.44MB of data, not even enough to store one photo these days!

After floppy discs came CDs, CDs can hold 700MB of data. CDs were in turn, replaced by DVDs, which hold 4.7GB.

We keep USB Memory Sticks in-stock in capacities ranging from 32GB to 512GB, and External Hard Drives in-stock ranging from 1TB to 4TB.

Now physical media has largely gone extinct and we’re starting to use Cloud Storage instead. But we still recommend backing up your precious and important data onto either a USB Memory Stick or External Hard Drive, just in case!

If you’d like advice on backing up your computer, just pop into either of our branches, give us a call or send us an e-mail!