Data Measurement Chart

Data Measurement Chart

Data Measurement Size

Bit Single Binary Digit (1 or 0)

Byte 8 bits

Kilobyte (KB) 1,024 Bytes

Megabyte (MB) 1,024 Kilobytes

Gigabyte (GB) 1,024 Megabytes

Terabyte (TB) 1,024 Gigabytes

Petabyte (PB) 1,024 Terabytes

Exabyte (EB) 1,024 Petabytes

Test your knowledge!

The first 3 questions here are from: Stanford University - CS101
You can check the answers there.

1. Alice has 600 MB of data. Bob has 2000 MB of data. Will it all fit on Alice's 4 GB thumb drive?

2. Alice has 100 small images, each of which is 500 KB. How much space do they take up overall in MB?

3. Your ghost hunting group is recording the sound inside a haunted classroom for 20 hours as MP3 audio files. About how
much data will that be, expressed in GB?

 2.
4000 bytes=____________KB

 3.
6000 bytes=___________KB

 4.
75000 bytes=____________KB

 5.
26000 bytes=_________KB

 6.
360,000 bytes=_____KB

 7.
2,000,000 bytes=________________MB
  8.
50,000,000,000 bytes=_________________GB

Lesson 1: Bytes and File Sizes

Research

Overview
In this lesson students are introduced to the standard units for measuring the sizes of digital files, from a single byte, all the way up to
terabytes and beyond. Students begin the lesson by comparing the size of a plain text file containing “hello” to a Word document with the
same contents. Students are introduced to the units kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte, and research the sizes of files they make
use of every day, using the appropriate terminology. This lesson foreshadows an investigation of compression as a means for combatting
the rapid growth of digital data.

Purpose
The simple purposes of this lesson are:

1. Get terminology out in the open

2. Become somewhat conversant with file types and sizes
3. Grapple with orders-of-magnitude differences between things.

The 8-bit byte has become the de-facto fundamental unit with which we measure the “size” of data on computers, and in fact, today most
computers only let you save data as combinations of whole bytes; even if you only want to store 1 bit of information, you have to use a
whole byte to do it. And many computer systems will require you store even more than that. Messages sent over the Internet are also
typically structured as messages with byte-offsets.

Paralleling the explosion of computing power and speed, the sheer size of the digital data now created and consumed every day is
staggering. Units of measure (terabytes) that previously seemed unfathomably large are now making their way into personal computing.
This rapid growth of digital data presents many new opportunities and also poses new challenges to engineers and programmers. The
implications of so-called Big Data will not be investigated until later in the course, but it's good and interesting to be thinking about the size
of things now.

Agenda
 Getting Started (10 mins)

 File Size Comparison: .txt vs .doc

 Activity (30 mins)
 Wrap-up

 Review worksheet
  Foreshadow Compression
 Assessment

View on Code Studio

Objectives
Students will be able to:

 Use appropriate terminology when describing the size of digital files.

 Identify and compare the size of familiar digital media.
 Solve small word problems that require reasoning about file sizes.

Preparation

 You should verify that you know how to look at the sizes of files on computers that your students are using (see activity).

 For the getting started activity might want a Word processing program (such as MS Word) and plain text editor (such as
Notepad or TextEdit) open and ready.

 The teaching remarks and content corners in this lesson contain lots of little bits of history that you might choose to share at
various points in the lesson.

 KEY Bytes and File Sizes

Links
Heads Up! Please make a copy of any documents you plan to share with students.

For the Students

 Bytes and File Sizes - Activity Guide Make a Copy

 CS101 - Kilobytes Megabytes Gigabytes Terabytes

Support
Lesson Forum

Report a Bug

Differentiation and accommodations for this lesson

Teaching Guide
Getting Started (10 mins)

Content Corner
Why is a Byte 8 bits?: The 8-bit byte was not always standard. Computers used many different "byte" sizes over the course of history,
depending on hardware and how addressable memory worked. However, much of the early computing world relied on representing data
and computer instructions encoded in ASCII text where every character is 8 bits. Thus, 8-bits was such a common chunk-size for
representing information that it stuck and they gave it its own name - byte.

There are various accounts about why it was called a “byte” but most point to early days at IBM where “bite” was used to to refer to groups
of 8-bits that a computer was processing, as in it could “bite” off 8 bits at time. The spelling was changed to “byte” to avoid confusion with
“bit”.
 Bytes became the fundamental unit with which we measure the “size” of data on computers, and in fact, today most computers only let you
save data as combinations of whole bytes; even if you only want to store 1 bit of information, you have to use a whole byte to do it.

Remarks
As we start a new unit about Data and Digital Information we need to get familiar with terminology about data and different types of data
files.

Vocabulary: Recall that a single character of ASCII text requires 8 bits. The technical term for 8 bits of data is a byte.

A byte is the standard fundamental unit (or “chunk size”) underlying most computing systems today. You may have heard "megabyte",
"kilobyte", "gigabyte", etc. which are all different amounts of a bytes. We're going to learn more about them today.

File Size Comparison: .txt vs .doc

Prompt: In addition to the actual text of a document, it is usually necessary to store the formatting information that allows the text to be
displayed correctly. We might wonder just how much extra information, i.e. how many extra bytes, we need to store when we include all of
this formatting. Let's find out!

If a single ASCII character is one byte then if we were to store the word “hello” in a plain ASCII text file in a computer, we would expect it to
need 5 bytes (or 40 bits) of memory.

What about a Microsoft Word document that contains the single word "hello"? How many more bytes will a Word document require to store
the word “hello” than a plain text document?

Discuss: Have students silently make their prediction, then share with a partner, then share with the group. Prompt a couple students to
share why they chose the size they did.

Teaching Tip
Try a Live Demo: If you wish, it might be more fun to create these files in front of your students, saving them on the desktop for a quick
demo. To make a plain ASCII text file you’ll need to use the correct program:

 PC/Windows: use Notepad

 Mac: use TextEdit (Note: TextEdit needs to be switched into plain text mode from rich text. Go to Format → Make Plain Text)

Demonstrate: Do a live demo where you show the size of the different files. Here are some files you can download to use.

 Plain text document hello.txt

 MS word document hello.docx

Content Corner
NOTE: A 5-byte file is so small that some computers won't allocate a chunk of memory that small. For example you might see something
like this:

Which indicates that even though the file is 5 bytes, it's taking up 4 Kilobytes of memory on your computer.

To find the actual size of a file on your computer, do one of the following:

 PC/Windows: Right-click and choose “Properties”

 Mac: Ctrl+click and choose “Get Info”

In general, the Word Doc should be thousands of times larger than the plain text. For the files above:

 hello.txt - 5 bytes
 hello.docx = 21,969 bytes

Review: Review students predictions to see how close they were.

Remarks
The big difference in file size between .txt and .docx is due to the extensive formatting information included along with the actual text in
.docx. Modern data files typically measure in the thousands, millions, billions or trillions of bytes. Let's get a little practice looking at files
and how big they are.
 Activity (30 mins)

Content Corner
There are some discrepancies in common usage of the kilo, mega, giga prefixes.

From the Stanford CS 101 website:

It's convenient within the computer to organize things in groups of powers of 2. For example, 210 is 1024, and so a program might group
1024 items together, as a sort of "round" number of things within the computer. The term "kilobyte" above refers to this group size of 1024
things. However, people also group things by thousands -- 1 thousand or 1 million items.

There's this problem with the word "megabyte" .. does it mean 1024 * 1024 bytes, i.e. 220 which is 1,048,576, or does it mean exactly 1
million, 1000 * 1000. It's just a 5% difference, but marketers tend to prefer the 1 million, interpretation, since it makes their hard drives etc.
appear to hold a little bit more. In an attempt to fix this, the terms "kibibyte" "mebibyte" "gibibyte" "tebibyte" have been introduced to
specifically mean the 1024 based units (see wikipedia kibibyte article). These terms do not seem to have caught on very strongly thus far.

If nothing else, remember that terms like "megabyte" have this little wiggle room in them between the 1024 and 1000 based meanings. For
purposes of CS Principles the distinction is not important - "about a million bytes" is a fine, close-enough interpretation for "megabyte".

Teaching Tip
Finding Solutions: Note that answers to 3 of the 6 questions on the activity guide can be found on the Stanford CS 101 page linked to in
the activity guide.

Perfect accuracy is not important for some sections in this activity, but using the correct terminology and achieving a rough estimate of size
(one million bytes vs. one billion) is important. Encourage students to practice using terms like megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte to gain
comfort with them.

Activity Guide: Bytes and File Sizes - Activity Guide

Group: Put students in pairs to find answers or work individually.

Distribute: Activity Guide: Bytes and File Sizes - Activity Guide

 Introduces the terminology

 Refers to websites for students to use as reference
o Stanford CS 101 website
o Computer Hope

 Has questions and space for students to write answers to questions like:

o How many bytes are in a Megabyte?

o Give an example of a file type that is measured in Gigabytes
o What is the typical size of a .jpg image, .mp3 audio etc.
 Allow students time to finish this activity either individually or in pairs by conducting online research.

 There are 6 practice questions on the 2nd page of the activity guide.

Wrap-up

Review worksheet
Share: Provide students an opportunity to clear up any remaining confusion and share interesting pieces of information they came across.

Review: Answers to the questions on the Activity Guide.

Foreshadow Compression
Teaching Tip
Time Saving Tip: Time permitting you could do the warm up activity from the next lesson (Text Compression) here. That warm up activity
asks students to write down common abbreviations they use when sending text messages to friends and family, and then asks why they
do that. The answer is compression: to save time and space.

Remarks
As you have seen data file size can grow very quickly in size. In the modern world there is a lot of data around us and usually we want it
transmitted over the internet.
There is a problem though: If you want to transmit a lot of data you are limited by the speed of your internet connection. Even if you have a
fast Internet connection there is a physical limit to how fast you can transmit bits.

What if the data you want to send is big enough that it takes an unreasonable amount of time to transmit it, even with a really fast internet
connection. Assuming you can't make the Internet connection any faster, could you still transmit the data faster somehow?

The answer is yes and it's probably something you've done, or do every day!

Assessment

Use the last 3 questions on the activity guide for assessment.

Standards Alignment

View full course alignment

CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards (2011)

CT - Computational Thinking

Computer Science Principles

2.1 - A variety of abstractions built upon binary sequences can be used to represent all digital data.3.3 - There are trade
offs when representing information as digital data.

CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards (2017)

DA - Data & Analysis

How much is 1 byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, etc.?

Updated: 04/01/2018 by Computer Hope

Below is a list of each of the accepted disk drive space values. It is important to realize that not all manufacturers and
developers list their value using binary, which is base 2. For example, a manufacturer may list a product's capacity as
one gigabyte (1,000,000,000 bytes, a metric value) and not 1,073,741,824 bytes (gibibyte) that it actually is. For this
page, we are using the "common names" and listing all values in base 2.

Note

All values are listed as whole numbers, which means a GB shows it can only contain one 650 MB CD. Technically, 1
GB could hold 1.5753 CDs worth of data, but this document isn't meant to show you how many "parts" of an object a
value can hold. Therefore, we are omitting decimal values. More plainly, you can only fit one complete 650 MB CD on a
1 GB drive since two full 650 MB discs exceed 1 GB.

Tip

Except for a bit and a nibble, all values explained below are in bytes and not bits. For example, a kilobyte (KB) is
different than a kilobit (Kb). When referring to storage, bytes are used whereas data transmission speeds are measured
in bits.

Bit

Computer bit and byte

A bit is a value of either a 1 or 0 (on or off).

Nibble

A nibble is 4 bits.

Byte
Today, a byte is 8 bits.

1 character, e.g., "a", is one byte.

Kilobyte (KB)

A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes.

2 or 3 paragraphs of text.

Megabyte (MB)

A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes or 1,024 kilobytes.

873 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

4 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

Gigabyte (GB)

A gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (230) bytes. 1,024 megabytes, or 1,048,576 kilobytes.

894,784 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

4,473 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

640 web pages (with 1.6 MB average file size).

341 digital pictures (with 3 MB average file size).

256 MP3 audio files (with 4 MB average file size).

1 650 MB CD.

Terabyte (TB)

A terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 (240) bytes, 1,024 gigabytes, or 1,048,576 megabytes.

916,259,689 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

4,581,298 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

655,360 web pages (with 1.6 MB average file size).

349,525 digital pictures (with 3 MB average file size).

262,144 MP3 audio files (with 4 MB average file size).

1,613 650 MB CD's.

233 4.38 GB DVDs.

40 25 GB Blu-ray discs.

Petabyte (PB)

A petabyte is 1,125,899,906,842,624 (250) bytes, 1,024 terabytes, 1,048,576 gigabytes, or 1,073,741,824 megabytes.

938,249,922,368 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

4,691,249,611 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

671,088,640 web pages (with 1.6 MB average file size).

357,913,941 digital pictures (with 3 MB average file size).

268,435,456 MP3 audio files (with 4 MB average file size).

1,651,910 650 MB CD's.

239,400 4.38 GB DVDs.

41,943 25 GB Blu-ray discs.

Exabyte (EB)

An exabyte is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 (260) bytes, 1,024 petabytes, 1,048,576 terabytes, 1,073,741,824 gigabytes,
or 1,099,511,627,776 megabytes.

960,767,920,505,705 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

4,803,839,602,528 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

687,194,767,360 web pages (with 1.6 MB average file size).

366,503,875,925 digital pictures (with 3 MB average file size).

274,877,906,944 MP3 audio files (with 4 MB average file size).

1,691,556,350 650 MB CD's.

245,146,535 4.38 GB DVDs.

42,949,672 25 GB Blu-ray discs.

Zettabyte (ZB)

A zettabyte is 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 (270) bytes, 1,024 exabytes, 1,048,576 petabytes, 1,073,741,824

terabytes, 1,099,511,627,776 gigabytes, or 1,125,899,910,000,000 megabytes.

983,826,350,597,842,752 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

4,919,131,752,989,213 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

703,687,443,750,000 web pages (with 1.6 MB average file size).

375,299,970,000,000 digital pictures (with 3 MB average file size).

281,474,977,500,000 MP3 audio files (with 4 MB average file size).

1,732,153,707,691 650 MB CD's.

251,030,052,003 4.38 GB DVDs.

43,980,465,111 25 GB Blu-ray discs.

Yottabyte (YB)

A yottabyte is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 (280) bytes, 1,024 zettabytes, 1,048,576 exabytes, 1,073,741,824

petabytes, 1,099,511,627,776 terabytes, 1,125,899,910,000,000 gigabytes, or 1,152,921,500,000,000,000 megabytes.

1,007,438,183,012,190,978,921 pages of plain text (1,200 characters).

5,037,190,915,060,954,894 books (200 pages or 240,000 characters).

720,575,937,500,000,000 web pages (with 1.6 MB average file size).

384,307,166,666,666,666 digital pictures (with 3 MB average file size).

288,230,375,000,000,000 MP3 audio files (with 4 MB average file size).

1,773,725,384,615,384 650 MB CD's.

257,054,773,251,740 4.38 GB DVDs.

45,035,996,273,704 25 GB Blu-ray discs.

 WORD PROBLEM SOLUTION
1. How many 100 bytes jpg
files can be stored on a 2 MB
folder in your hard drive?

2. Alice has 100 small images,

each of which is 300 KB. How
much space do they take up
overall in MB?

3. Alice has 600 MB of data.

Bob has 2000 MB of data.
Aron has also 4000 MB of
data. Will it all fit on Alice's 4
GB thumb drive?