#BITS AND BYTES HOW TO#

So a one Megabyte file is actually an 8,000,000 bit file. The key to understanding the terminology for storage is remembering that eight bits equals one byte. As file sizes grew over the years, it was easier to understand how long it would take to store or retrieve the file. Transmission over the network was (and still is) limited by the transmission medium used. Storing and retrieving data locally on a computer has always been faster than transmitting it over a network. As the medium of transmission changed over the years, so has the transmission rate. From there, we skyrocketed to 1Mbits/s then 100 Mbits/s then 1000 Mbits/s (1Gb/s), 10000 Mb/s (10Gbit/s). We have gone from 9600 bits/s to 14.4 kbits/s to 28.8 kbits/s to 56 kbits/s to 128 kbits/s. The following table describes this:Īs network speeds have increased, it has become easier to describe transmission rates in higher units of measurement. When data is transmitted over a network medium, it is typically written in bits/s, kilobits/s(kbps), megabits/s (Mbps), or gigabits/s (Gbps). This gives us an easy way to estimate how long something is going to take. ' We could have used minutes, hours, days, or even microseconds, but seconds became the customary standard. We can arbitrarily express the rate of transmission as 'bit per. How we interpret the rate of the bits transmitted denotes how we communicate that rate of transmission. Regardless of the amount of data transmitted over the network, or stored or retrieved from storage, the information is streamed as bits.

Computers also send and receive data as ones and zeroes-bits. Computers interpret our intentions and process information by the respective representation of those 'instructions' as bits. A bit is considered to be the smallest unit of data measurement. So, bits and bytes are both units of data, but what is the actual difference between them? One byte is equivalent to eight bits. It can be easy to confuse the two because both bits/s and bytes/s represent data transmission speeds, but remember that, in the abbreviations for each, the uppercase 'B' stands for bytes while the lowercase 'b' stands for bits. Megabytes are typically for storage (RAM, HDD, SSD, NVMe, etc.), and megabits are typically for network bandwidth or throughput (network cards, modems, WiFi adapters, etc.). I'm not saying who that happened to… TL DR But then you get on a call with an ISP rep, and they promise you 10 gigabytes/s, 40 gigabytes/s, 100 gigabytes/s or one gigabyte/s of bandwidth, and you purchase the service only to find out the hard way that they meant 100 gigabits/s. As sysadmins, we sometimes blend the two-bits and bytes-but there is a difference between them. I hate to break it to you, but your internet speed is not 100MB/s (megabytes per second) it is more like 100Mb/s (megabits per second). Learning path: Getting started with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS.

#BITS AND BYTES HOW TO#

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Bits and bytes