Real-Life Math
You are the database administrator for a small company. You are
responsible for administering a large database of company records.
The
database is stored on a fixed disk that is beginning to develop some problems.
You are concerned that the disk will crash someday soon. You decide to protect
your database by moving it to another disk.
Your employer doesn't
want to buy a new fixed disk if he can help it. He asks you to find out if
there is space available on one of the existing disks.
Your database
currently takes up 300 MB (megabytes) of disk space.
You investigate
Fixed Disk E, which is a 1 GB (gigabyte) disk. It already contains
software applications that are taking up 800 MB of space, some video files
that are consuming 150 MB of space and some corporate documents that are taking
up 500 KB of space.
A bit (b) is the smallest unit of data in a computer.
Bits are usually stored in multiples of 8 called bytes (B). Computer storage
is usually measured in byte multiples. Byte multiples are based on powers
of 2 and are usually expressed as a "rounded off" decimal number.
A
kilobyte (KB or Kbyte) is approximately 1,000 bytes (it's actually 1,024
bytes). A megabyte (MB) is 2 to the 20th power or 1,048,576 bytes. A gigabyte
(GB) is roughly a billion bytes. A gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power or 1,073,741,824
bytes.
How much space is available on Fixed Disk E? Will this be enough
to store the database?