How many KB's are there in a megabyte?

Answer 1

A KB, or kilobyte can either be 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes, depending on it's application. A megabyte can either be 1,000 kilobytes or 1,024 kilobytes, depending on it's application.

Typically speaking, network data transfer speeds and raw hard drive storage space often use 1,000 bytes per Kilobyte where as file sizes and volatile memory (such as RAM) often use 1,024 bytes per Kilobyte.

Due to the design of Binary, computers commonly feature numbers that are a power of two. One bit can represent one of two numbers, those numbers being zero or one. Two bits can represent one of four possible numbers, those numbers being zero, one, two, and three. Three bits can represent one of eight possible numbers.

Eventually, we find that 10 bits can represent one of 1,024 numbers.

Although many people disagree, some people believed that 1,024 was too complicated and thought it could be simplified it to 1,000. This simplification is often taken advantage of by marketing groups. For example, a hard drive could be marketed as a 100 Gigabyte drive, or a drive that can store 100,000,000,000 bytes of data. Operating Systems generally use the 1,024 rule, so when the hard drive is plugged in, the Operating System will report that the hard drive can only hold about 93 GB of data.

The mega- and kilo- prefixes come from metric units of measurement. A kilogram, for example, is 1,000 grams. A megagram is 1,000 kilograms. A gigagram is 1,000 megagrams.

Technically speaking, one Kilobyte (KB) is 1,000 bytes whereas one Kibibyte (KiB) is 1,024 bytes. Kibibyte is very rarely used and Kilobyte is often used to refer to both 1,000 and 1,024 bytes, as is Mibibyte to Megabyte, Gibibyte to Gigabyte, and so on.