Although data volume can become enormous when dealing with distributed systems, calculation all boils down to the basics. To obtain correct calculations, it is critical to know the data volume unit using the power of 2. A byte is a sequence of 8 bits. An ASCII character uses one byte of memory (8 bits). Below is a table explaining the data volume unit (Table 1).

Although data volume can become enormous when dealing with distributed systems, calculation all boils down to the basics. To obtain correct calculations, it is critical to know the data volume unit using the power of 2. A byte is a sequence of 8 bits. An ASCII character uses one byte of memory (8 bits). Below is a table explaining the data volume unit (Table 1).

Power Approximate value Full name Short name

10 1 Thousand 1 Kilobyte 1 KB

20 1 Million 1 Megabyte 1 MB

30 1 Billion 1 Gigabyte 1 GB

40 1 Trillion 1 Terabyte 1 TB

50 1 Quadrillion 1 Petabyte 1 PB

Table 1