What is often seen as the smallest unit of computer memory other than byte?

A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. The kilobyte (abbreviated "K" or "KB") is the smallest unit of memory greater than a byte. It precedes the megabyte, which contains 1,000,000 bytes. While one kilobyte is technically 1000 bytes, a kilobyte is often used synonymously with kibibytes, which contains 1,024 bytes.

Kilobytes are most often used to measure the size of small files. For example, a plain text document may contain 10KB of data and therefore would have a file size of 10 kilobytes. Small website graphics are often between 5KB and 100KB in size. While some files contain less than 4KB of data, modern files systems such as NTFS (windows) and HFS+ (mac) have a cluster size of 4KB. Therefore, individual files typically take up a minimum of four kilobytes of disk space.

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9 Comments

wilestj

Poor question. It said "SMALLEST" unit of computer memory "OTHER" than byte. In the explanation it said "GREATER" than byte. The answer should have been "BIT".

Leslie Hayden

The question should be reworded to something like, "which of the following is the smallest unit of memory." Also in the explanation the author says that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes but memory is measured in even multiples using the binary number system so a kilobyte is 1024 units and a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes or 1,048,576 bytes.

Stevie G

Poorly question that the explanation does not confirm. The smallest unit of storage in computer is a BIT also called as BINARY DIGIT("BI"from binary and "T" from digit). The capacity of storing data in a system is calculated in terms of Bits and Bytes.