CMPT 120 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: 5,6,7,8

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Computing Science
• Course: CMPT 120
• Professor: Liaqat Ali

Document Summary

Hard disks and other storage devices also use binary for similar reasons. A single piece of storage that can store a zero or one is called a bit. Since a bit is a very small piece of information to worry about, bits are often grouped. It"s common to divide a computer"s memory into eight-bit groups called bytes. When measuring storage capacity, the number of bits or bytes quickly becomes large. Figure 2. 1 show the prefixes that are used for storage units and what they mean. 12 220 bytes = 12582912 bytes = 12582912 8 bits = 100663296 bits . Note that the values in figure 2. 1 are slightly different than the usual meaning of the metric prefixes. One kilometre is exactly 1000 metres, not 1024 metres. When measuring storage capacities in computers, the 1024 version of the metric prefixes is usually used. Once you have a bunch of bits, you can use them to represent numbers.