Kilo, Mega, Giga...then what?

One byte = 1 character of text.

You can see that this is rather clunky when dealing with larger sizes of data (imagine talking about that 10 page research paper as being 1,643,254 bytes long ....... and forget about talking audio or video!)

So we turn to the metric system for help.

1024 bytes is called a KILObyte.
1024 KILObytes is a MEGAbyte.

So here's the list:

Kilo (10**3)
Mega (10**9)
Giga (10**12)
Tera (10**15)
Peta (10**18)
Exa (10**21)
Zetta (10**24)
Yotta (10**27)

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci499008,00.html for more info.

So, in practical terms, what does this mean?

1 Kilobyte is about a single page of double-spaced typed text, .006 seconds of CD stereo audio (uncompressed), and .000286 seconds of high definition uncompressed video.
1 Megabyte would be roughly 1000 pages of text, 5.9 seconds of audio, and a third of a second of video.
1 Gigabyte would be 1.7 hours of audio and 5 minutes of video.
1 Terabyte would be 2.4 months of audio and 3.6 days of video.
1 Petabyte would be 202.4 years of audio and almost 10 years of video.
1 Exabyte would be 2071 centuries of audio and 10 centuries of video.