How much is 100MB in a 1GB?

Answer 1

Although we use "kilo-" and "mega-" in computer science to describe the magnitude of the units of storage, they don't mean the exact same as they would in other disciplines. For historical reasons, we group memory into sequences of 8 bits at a time, so for reasons of performance we have to deal with numbers that divide evenly into groups of 8. 1024 happens to be close enough to a power-of-ten (1000 = 10^3), so we prefer to deal numerically with quantities of data storage that divide evenly by 1024.

Thus, there are actually 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, not a thousand as in kilometer. There are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte for the same reason -- which means that there are 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte.

So, 100MB = 1,048,576 x 100 = 104,857,600 bytes.

One gigabyte, to continue the pattern from before, is 1,048,576 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.

To find out how many of one thing fit into another thing, of course, all we have to divide:

1073741824 / 104857600 = 10.24.

Thus, you can fit a little less than 10-and-a-quarter things-that-are-100-megs-big into a 1-gig space.