Basic units

[Tacet]

Posted here for lack of a more apt forum. If a mod knows of a better place to post this, please move it.

For now I'm only going to cover a very few units that I've often seen messed up on this forum.

kbps - kilo (thousand) bits per second. Our slowest ADSL is 384 kbps
Mbps - Mega (million) bits per second. Much faster than kbps
mbps - milli (1/1000) bits per seond. Not a standard unit. Extremely slow.
kBps - kilo bytes per second. 8x faster than kbps
MBps - Mega bytes per second. 8x faster than Mbps

Note: there are 8 bits in a byte

Kbps - K is not a valid prefix.
Hz - hertz, the commonly accepted unit for frequency.
hz - not a valid unit

 

[Valis]

Good stuff! I saw an article on here just yesterday that was trying to explain these prefixes and the writer used capital K for kilo

Just one thing, SI standard requires a space between the dimension and the unit i.e. 384 kbps (as the OP rightly has it ) not 384kbps.

 

[ponder]

I prefer the Mb/s, kb/s notation.

 

[rebel998]

kB (kilobyte)
MB (megabyte)
GB (gigabyte)
TB (terabyte)
PB (petabyte)
EB (exabyte)
ZB (zettabyte)
YB (yottabyte)

In x1000 increments.

 

[MiY4Gi]

kbps or kbits = kilo bits per second
mbps or Mbps or mbits = mega bits per second
kb/s or kB/s = kilo bytes per second
mb/s or MB/s = mega bytes per second

 

[rebel998]

kB (kilobyte)
MB (megabyte)
GB (gigabyte)
TB (terabyte)
PB (petabyte)
EB (exabyte)
ZB (zettabyte)
YB (yottabyte)

In x1000 increments.

 

[rebel998]

kbps = kilo bits per second
mbps or Mbps = mega bits per second
kB/s = kilo bytes per second
MB/s = mega bytes per second

Better?

 

[Voicy]

kB (kilobyte)
MB (megabyte)
GB (gigabyte)
TB (terabyte)
PB (petabyte)
EB (exabyte)
ZB (zettabyte)
YB (yottabyte)

In x1024 increments.

fixed.