Welcome!


FunAdvice is a social question & answer site where you can make friends, share photos and meet people near you.
FunAdvice RSS for this page:
Rss_feed

how do you know how many mb is in kb?

My eye sees all Asked by mozz 6 months ago, 4 answers.
Send me Fun Mail

How do you know how many mb is in kb? Can anyone tell me how many mb is in 1440 kb?

Send this to a friend

Answered by aarthur001 on Feb 16, 2008, 09:42AM
Send me Fun Mail | 195 answers.

Stephanie was close. It is precisely 1024 Bytes in a KB. It is precisely 1024 KB in a MB.

The word Kilo is the Greek word for 1,000.
The word Mega is the Greek word for 1,000,000.

Because of the extra 24 bytes per KB, a megabyte is not exactly 1,000,000 bytes.

| 2 of 2 thought this was helpful

blowing a kiss Answered by stephanief987 on Feb 16, 2008, 07:19AM
Send me Fun Mail | 7587 answers.

1MB = 1000KB
You do the math.

| 1 of 1 thought this was helpful

Whiteboard portrate Answered by filletofspam on Feb 16, 2008, 10:32AM
Send me Fun Mail | 2114 answers.

On computers in most places a kilobite is 2^10 and a megabite is 2^20.

One exception is the way hard disk manufacturers advertise disk size. When they say megabite to mean 10^6 rather than 2^20 bytes. Likewise they also consider a gigabite to be 10^9 bytes and a terabyte to be 10^12 bytes. Many people feel the way hard disk makers advertise quantity is misleading and there was even a class action lawsuit against hard drive manufactgurers but I don't know what ever became of it. In places where the power of 2 and the power of 10 quantities can be confused it is best to use a small 'm' for power of 10 and a large 'M' for power of 2.

Byte is also a problem. We think of bytes as 8 bits but they aren't necessarily so. Throughout computer history bytes have been diffferent sizes because some computers has smaller or larger character sets. The highly influencial IBM 360 mainframe set the byte at 8 bits and when microcomputers came on the scene they also used 8 bits. Now we need more than 8 bits for extended character sets so we end up using multibyte characters. Perhaps we would have been better off using a longer word but it would be rather difficult to change at this point. When I did some consulting work with the US Navy they avoided the term byte and used octet for 8 bit quantities. Ironically they still called a 4 bit quantity a nibble instead of a quartet but as far as I know nibble has never been used to describe anything but 4 bits. I suppose if we used 10 bit bytes we could have 5 bit nibbles but I digress.

An other problem is if you mean bit or byte. Network people talk about throughput in terms of bits while comuter people usually talk in terms of bytes. On a network we have T1s that have 1.5 megabits/second of bandwidth while on a hardrive we might write 20 megabytes/second of throughput. To distinguish between bits and bytes in abreviations we usually use a small 'b' for bits and a large 'B' for bytes.

So one would assume

kb=10^3 bits
kB=10^3 bytes
Kb=2^10 bits
KB=2^10 bytes
mb=10^6 bits
mB=10^6 bytes
Mb=2^20 bits
MB=2^20 bytes

Since you are asking about 1440 I assume you are refering to the old 3.5' floppy. They are generally refered to as 1.44 MB floppies but they really aren't. The 1.44 MB floppy had 2 sides, 80 tracks, 18 sectors/track, and 512 bytes/sector. This comes out to 1474560 bytes. If we divide that by 10^6 we get 1.48 mB; if we divide that by 2^20 ro 1048576 we get 1.41 MB. Also, you don't get all that space to use. The operating system needs to put a directory and other information on the disk so the formatted (useable) capacity is a little less.

My eye sees all Answered by mozz on Feb 16, 2008, 03:54PM
Send me Fun Mail | 44 answers.

thx guys x]

Answer this Question: " How do you know how many mb is in kb?"

Your Answer: HTML is not allowed.


Back to top

Most popular related questions