AB D

· 01 Jan 2022

Follow Following

How Many Bits Are In A Byte?

#Bit or Binary Digit is the smallest unit of information (data) on a computer. As you know, computers use Binary Number System to store all types of data like numbers, words, videos, music, and pictures, etc.

What Is Bit?

The binary number system calculates using only a combination of two digits (0 and 1). This means that the data in the computer is stored in the form of zero (0) and one (1) (this is called machine language). So we define zero or one by Bit.

There are billions of transistors in the circuit of a computer processor. Each transistor is a small switch, which is activated by the electronic signals it receives. So whenever the transistor is ON, we consider it as '1', while when it is of that condition is considered as '0'. So bits are the basic unit of data storage in a computer.

Four #bits (1001) together form a nibble, which is also called a half byte. Data transfer speed is always measured in bits. For example 1Mbps (1 megabit per second) internet speed, here the small 'b' stands for a bit. So bit is the smallest piece of computer data whose value can be 1 or 0.

What is Byte?

A group of 8 bits is called a byte. That is, a series of eight zeros and one (10101100) is considered a byte, which can store a single character such as the letter B, the number 5, and a graphic symbol. More Bytes are used to store large-size data.

For example, #kilobyte (KB) which contains 1,024 bytes, megabyte (MB) which is equal to 1,024 kilobytes, gigabyte (GB) which is equal to 1,024 megabytes, similarly terabyte (TB) which is 1,024 gigabytes. In computers, the term Bytes is often used to measure data storage.

For example, a hard drive can be 250 GB (Gigabytes). Here it is important for you to know that capital 'B' is always used for bytes. Whereas small 'b' is used to represent bits.

Difference Between Bits and Bytes

Bit and Byte are both units of computer memory, but there are several basic differences between the two. However, by now you must have understood a little bit about the difference between these two. Let us see the main difference between them:

A bit is the smallest unit of computer memory, while a group of 8 bits is called a byte.

A bit can store two different values ​​'0' and '1', while conversely, a byte can usually hold 256 different values.

A bit is represented by small 'b', the same capital 'B' is used to represent Byte.

Data transfer speed is often measured in bits, while bytes are used to measure data size.


As you know, in all memory units of computer storage, the smallest unit of data is Bit which is represented by a 0 or a 1. A collection of 8 bits is called a byte, which represents a character. Now if we want to represent more characters then of course these #bytes have to be added together to form further memory units.

The different units of memory are shown below:

4 Bits = 1 Nibble
8 Bits = 1Byte
1024 Byte    = 1 Kilobyte
1024 Kilobyte = 1Megabyte
1024 Megabyte=1Gigabyte
1024 Gigabyte  =1Terabyte
1024 Terabyte =1Petabyte
1024 Petabyte =1Exabyte