Computer technology is already so densely entered into the life of ordinary citizens that, probably, nowadays almost everyone already knows how many megabytes in a gigabyte. In any case, he thinks he knows. To hear the correct answer to this seemingly elementary and children's question is brought up not so often. With all this, the answers are always different.
What are megabytes and gigabytes?
Nowadays, it’s quite difficult to find people who do not know what these 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 are the most common term, which is very often used to describe the size of both movies or computer games, and the hard drive or RAM. Although in the near future the term terabyte may supplant the most widely used computer concept today, 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 will argue with the statement that you can use a personal computer without knowing how many megabytes in a gigabyte. However, judge for yourself: almost every schoolchild knows these elementary units of measuring computer information today: computer science lessons are not in vain.
Every day we are confronted with bits, bytes, kilobytes and other units of measurement of computer information, because it is with their help that we can measure the RAM or internal memory of devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, flash cards, MP3 players and others.
Internet users almost always deal with megabytes and gigabytes, especially if they download any program, audio recording or movie onto their personal computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. It is extremely important to know how long a particular file downloaded from the Internet takes, because using this knowledge you can understand how long a song, movie or computer game will take and if there is enough free space on a flash drive for this.
So how many megabytes are in gigabytes?
Initially, it might seem that converting megabytes to gigabytes is very simple. Surely, each of us since school has remembered that “giga” means a billion, while “mega” means a million. Hence the answer to the question of how much
A megabyte in one gigabyte would seem logical. To transfer 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.
Why not 1000?
As you know, absolutely all computers operate in a
binary number
system , that is, they use only two digits - 0 and 1. In their turn, a unit of information that can take the value 0 or 1 is called a bit. Soon a byte appeared that included 8 bits. As time went on, technology improved, and over time it became clear that the byte is still very small, and larger units of measurement were needed to measure information.
Soon they remembered the international system for measuring quantities. However, in computer science it was much more convenient to measure the values by powers of two, so together 1000 it was decided to choose the number 1024, since this is the 10 power of the number 2. After that, the binary "kilo" became equal to 1024. Based on the foregoing, we can confidently state how much megabytes to gigabytes - 1024.