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About these units
Bit (b)
A bit is the most fundamental unit of digital information, representing a binary value of 0 or 1. In physical systems, a bit corresponds to two distinguishable states—such as high/low voltage, magnetic polarity, or light/dark in optical systems. Bits form the basis of all digital computation: CPUs manipulate bits through logic gates, memory stores bits in capacitors or magnetic cells, and communication networks transmit bits as electrical pulses or photons. Although extremely small in size, bits accumulate into vast structures—from kilobytes of text to petabytes of cloud storage. Every digital phenomenon—files, images, videos, software—ultimately reduces to sequences of bits. The bit is the "atom" of information.
Block (block)
A block is a unit of data storage used by file systems, typically ranging from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes, though advanced systems may use even larger sizes (8 KB, 16 KB, etc.). Blocks form the fundamental allocation unit for disk storage—files occupy blocks on disk, and file systems track which blocks belong to which files. Block size has significant performance implications. Larger blocks improve read/write throughput but may waste space for small files (internal fragmentation). Smaller blocks offer precision but reduce I/O efficiency. Many classic file systems (FAT, ext2), modern ones (ext4, NTFS), and network storage systems (ZFS, Btrfs, distributed file systems) all rely on block-based allocation. Blocks bridge the gap between raw physical storage and abstract file structures.