1000 or 1024? How many megabytes in a gigabyte?

Computer technology has already become so densely integrated into the life of ordinary citizens that, probably, nowadays almost everyone knows how many megabytes in gigabyte. In any case, he thinks he knows. To hear the correct answer to this seemingly elementary and childish question is not so often. With all this, the answers are always different.

What is a megabyte and gigabyte?

Today it is rather difficult to find people who do not know what the two words mean - megabytes and gigabytes. These terms are used in the computer world specifically to describe the space required to store files, or the capacity of any drive.

At the moment, gigabytes is the most common term, which is often used to describe the size of both movies or computer games, and hard disk or RAM. Although in the near future the term terabyte can displace the most common computer concept from the usual usage, it is quite possible that in the near future it will not be necessary to know how many megabytes are in a gigabyte.

Do you need to know the number of megabytes in a gigabyte?

Few people will argue with the statement that you can use a personal computer without knowing how many megabytes in gigabyte. However, judge for yourself: elementary units of measuring computer information volumes are known to almost every schoolchild today: computer science lessons are not in vain.

Every day we are faced with bits, bytes, kilobytes and other units of computer information, because with their help we can measure the operational or internal memory of devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, flash cards, MP3 players and Other.

Users of the Internet almost constantly deal with megabytes and gigabytes, especially if they download to your personal computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone any program, audio recording or film. To know how much a particular file is downloaded from the Internet is extremely important, since using this knowledge, it is possible to understand how long a song, movie or computer game will be loaded and whether there will be enough free space for this on a flash drive.

So how many megabytes are in gigabyte?

Initially, it may seem that it is very easy to convert megabytes to gigabytes. Surely, each of us since the times of school remembers that "giga" means a billion, while "mega" is a million. Hence the answer to the question about how much Megabytes in one gigabyte, it would seem, is logical. To convert from megabytes to gigabytes, you just need to multiply the figure by a thousand, and the result will not be long in coming. But it was not there. In a gigabyte not 1000 megabytes, as the absolute majority believes, but 1024.

And why not 1000?

As you know, absolutely all computers function in the binary system , that is, they use only two digits - 0 and 1 - in their work. In turn, a unit of information capable of taking the value 0 or 1 is called a bit. Soon a byte appeared, which includes 8 bits. As time went by, technologies were improving, and over time it became clear that the byte was still very small, and for measurement of information, larger units of measurement were needed.

Soon they remembered the international system of measuring quantities. However, in computer science, it was much more convenient to measure values with powers of two, so together 1000 it was decided to choose the number 1024, since it is the 10th power of the number 2. After that, the binary "kilo" became equal to 1024. Based on the foregoing, it is possible to state with certainty how much Megabyte in gigabyte - 1024.