1 Answer

In short, the "kilo-", "mega-", "giga-" and "tera-" prefixes are similar to their use in any other unit of measurement, like metres or watts:

1 B = 1 byte;1 kB = 1000 bytes;1 MB = 1000 kB;1 GB = 1000 MB or 1 000 000 000 bytes.

(To confuse matters, "1 KB" or "1K" is used by many computer people to mean 1024 bytes, which is a convenient number in binary. To avoid this confusion with standard scientific usage of "mega-" and so on, the terms "kibibyte" (KiB), "mebibyte" (MiB), "gibibyte" (GiB) and "tebibyte" are now recommended for these non-decimal technical units. You might still feel short-changed if you bought a 4GB flash drive and it's only 3.725GiB. For simplicity this article will stick to round 1000s and kilobytes [kB].)