Datamäärä

Datamäärä is a term used in Finnish to denote the amount of data stored or transmitted. It describes the quantity of data in a device, file, or network and is usually expressed in bytes or larger units.

Data amount is measured using bytes; one byte equals eight bits. Common units include kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB), and terabyte (TB). In some contexts, binary prefixes such as KiB, MiB, GiB, and TiB are used, where 1 KiB equals 1024 bytes. In many consumer and industry contexts, decimal prefixes are used (1 KB = 1000 bytes, 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes).

Datamäärä is used to quantify storage capacity (hard drives, SSDs, cloud storage), data transfer or data usage allowances (mobile plans, internet service, streaming services), and data processing volumes (datasets, backups, analytics). It is a key parameter in pricing, quotas, and capacity planning.

Typical examples: a short text file may be a few kilobytes; a high-resolution photo can be several megabytes; a full movie may be several gigabytes. A smartphone with 128 GB storage can hold roughly 100,000 to 150,000 photos, depending on formats and metadata.

See also: data size, data capacity, data rate, bandwidth.