by 
The Curious Bag
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Hard drive capacity is measured in gigabytes or terabytes. Common sizes range from 250 gigabytes to 1.5 terabytes.
Basic Nomenclature
A bit is the basic building block of data and a byte contains 8 bits. Each byte represents one character, letter, number or symbol. A gigabyte, abbreviated GB, is 1 billion bytes. A terabyte, abbreviated TB, is 1 trillion bytes.
Differences in Definition
Hard drive manufacturers define a gigabyte as 1,000 MB or 1,000,000,000 bytes. A gigabyte can also be defined as 1,024 mebibytes or 1,073,741,824 using the binary system.
Types of Data
Different types of data take up different amounts of space. Images and video take up more space than documents. Data compression can also make a file smaller.
Other Factors
Drive capacities given by the manufacturer are the largest that the drive can hold. Once you format the drive for use, it will lose some capacity. Also, data is stored in blocks and if any data is put in the block, that block is listed as full and the extra space is not used.
Storage Amounts
Based on a 640 GB hard drive that is used for data only, the following amounts can be stored: 458,000 photos from a 5-megapixel camera, 1,440 hours of mpeg4 video, 581,000 office files or 307,000 four-minute MP3 songs.
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