// LEARN / DATA SIZES
How big is a gigabyte?
Zoom from a single letter up to all the data made on Earth in a year. Set your broadband and your storage to see what each size means for you: how long it takes to download, and how many would fit.
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What a megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte actually hold
The zoom above shows the sizes side by side. If you just want the everyday version, this is it.
A megabyte (MB) is small. One photo from a modern phone is about 3 MB, a song is about 8 MB and a short email with no attachments is a fraction of one. Anything measured in megabytes downloads in seconds on normal broadband.
A gigabyte (GB) is about a thousand megabytes. It holds roughly 340 phone photos, 250 songs or about 20 minutes of 4K video. An hour of HD streaming uses about 3 GB, which is why a monthly mobile data allowance is counted in gigabytes. Phones are sold with 64, 128 or 256 GB of storage, and Windows itself needs about 60 GB before you have saved anything.
A terabyte (TB) is about a thousand gigabytes. That is around 350,000 photos or 500 hours of HD video, which is why backup drives and the hard drives in desktop PCs are sold in terabytes. Most households never fill one.
Two things catch people out. Drive makers count 1,000 MB as a gigabyte while Windows counts 1,024, so a new 1 TB drive shows as about 931 GB. And broadband speed is measured in megabits, not megabytes: there are eight bits in a byte, so a 100 Mb connection moves about 12 MB a second. Our drive size guide works out what fits on a given drive, and the broadband guide explains the speed side.
If your computer is running out of space or you are not sure what to back up, get in touch and we will sort it, at your home or over a remote session.