Mbps ? Megabytes? Megabits??

K

kenny1999

Member
Hi, for long, I only had knowledge of MB in windows. The file size is 1MB; The filesize is 100MB, and 1G = 1000MB. and 1T = 1000G

Somebody told me that there are a lot more than that. Megabits, Megabytes, Mbps.......things getting confusing.

For example, my ISP claims to provide 100Mbps service to me. What does that mean. What is the maximum theoretical speed I can have under this specification?

In fact, does 100Mbps and 1000Mbps broadband make a lot of difference? Somebody said 1000Mbps would be more stable in terms of connection and would play 4K video on Youtube much faster. Can anyone comment on that?
 
I mean, that's only an order of magnitude difference between the two :P

Also, "watching video faster" is a really awkward comparison..

There are 8 bits in a byte, so if you divide your internet speed by that you can get a good guess of what your download speed would be v(100 Mbps / 8 is 12.5 MB/sec etc.)

Mbps is usually a bits reference while bytes is represented in MB/sec or similar (sometimes MBps). Also, a PC uses a binary prefix instead of one based on base 10. This means a 'kibibyte' is 1024 bytes instead of 1000. This is why hard drive capacity always looks lower than what is on the box (as you have that loss for each denomination of capacity).
 
Generally, capacity is specified in bytes, and bandwidth in bits. For instance, a 1GB file is 1 gigabyte, or 1,024 megabytes. A 100Mbps WAN connection is megabits, so to turn that into bytes you divide by 8. An easy way to tell is to look at the "B". If it's uppercase it refers to byte, and lowercase refers to bit.

A 100Mbps vs 1000Mbps WAN connection is 10 fold, so it would be a huge difference if fully utilized. A 100Mbps connection is perfectly capable of playing video, even 4K, so that's not a good comparison when trying to tell someone the difference between the two.
 
Geoff said:
Generally, capacity is specified in bytes, and bandwidth in bits.
Click to expand...

Unless you're a storage manufacturer :P

It seems to break down a lot where for raw storage and transfer mechanisms where you aren't expecting to 'directly use' the data and are just dealing with some various quantity of bits themselves. Since PCs only operate in the Base2 realm you have a bit of an abstraction layer to make that pool 'usable' for data in bytes.
 
beers said:
Unless you're a storage manufacturer :P

It seems to break down a lot where for raw storage and transfer mechanisms where you aren't expecting to 'directly use' the data and are just dealing with some various quantity of bits themselves. Since PCs only operate in the Base2 realm you have a bit of an abstraction layer to make that pool 'usable' for data in bytes.
Click to expand...
All storage media I see advertised is in bytes. 500GB, 1TB, etc.
 
Geoff said:
All storage media I see advertised is in bytes. 500GB, 1TB, etc.
Click to expand...

I probably poorly phrased that :P , but you also run into a base10 vs base2 situation so it's kind of inaccurate to compare them directly. Not sure if OP is interested in the difference but just in case:

Example for 500 GB (sold as 500,000,000,000 bytes)

1000 (kilobyte) / 1024 (kibibyte) = 0.976562
0.976562 (kibibytes) * 0.976562 (to mibibytes) * 0.976562 (to gibibytes) = ~0.931

500 GB * 93.1% = ~465 GiB of usable space.

To get a full 500 GiB of usable space they'd need to ship the drive with at least 536,870,912,000 bytes.
Click to expand...
 
beers said:
I probably poorly phrased that :P , but you also run into a base10 vs base2 situation so it's kind of inaccurate to compare them directly. Not sure if OP is interested in the difference but just in case:
Click to expand...
My post was more geared towards the difference of byte vs bit, not so much the technicalities of base10 vs base2 :P
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top