How Big is a Gigabyte

I have previously mentioned how glad I was when I got a new computer and it had a 25 MB hard drive and now there seems to be no end to the amount of data of data storage. For some time the limit was 137 GB, which is a rather large amount of data and if you are talking to a mathematician he will describe it as 10 to the ninth (9) power or 10 ⁹ and written in numerical form would be 1,000,000,000. So 1 GB would be 1,000,000,000. If you have an older computer with a 28 bit communication address system on the hard drive this system in effect limited the size of your hard drive to 137 GB. A hard drive is divided into sectors and a sector is an address containing, or is capable of containing 512 bytes of information. The 28 bits is a binary number and when converted to decimal numeration it limits the size of the sector to 268,435,455 sectors on a hard drive and multiplying 268,435,455 x 512 (512 bytes of information) gives 137 GB with this being the maximum size of a usable hard drive on an older computer. A newer standard of ATA/ATAPI – 6 changes the addressable size address to 48 bits thus giving us a system of petabytes now instead of gigabytes. When thinking about a gigabyte in these terms it really doesn’t seem so large. The hard drive of just a few years ago with a maximum size of 137 GB in my computer today would be full and information left over with no place to stay. But just think about the newer standard using 48 bits for the address the new standard changes our way of thinking from megabytes, to gigabytes to petabytes and computer science tells us the new limit is 144 petabytes and should sustain us for the next 50 years. I guess by then they will have to come up with a new numbering system. In case you were wondering a petabytes is the same as a quadrillion and it has 15 zero’s. A gigabyte is known as a billion and has only 9 zero’s. When thinking about numbers of this size, it reminds me of our national debt of a trillion dollars having 12 zero’s and climbing.