What is the difference between byte and bit?

Yep, exactly. One reason why you've heard it both ways is that hard drives are usually measured in bytes, while things like internet speeds are usually measured in bits.

So, a hard drve is 250 gigaBYTES, and a router supports gigaBIT-speed on its Ethernet ports.

An interesting side effect of this is that Windows tends to measure transfer speed of files in bytes, even if that transfer is an Internet download. So you can get on your five megabit per second Internet connection and download a 100 megabyte file, and wonder why its transferring at around 600 "kb" according to Windows, instead of five megabytes per second. But, you're not paying for a five megabyte connection, but five megaBITs. Your five megabit connection should get you about 5000 kiloBITS per second. Since there are eight bits in a byte, you divide that 5000 by 8 to get the kilobyte per second speed.

When you do, you see that 5000 kilobits a second is about 625 kiloBYTES a second to Windows. Just something to remember when thinking about internet transfer speeds and how they affect downloads!

byte = 8 bits...

data transfer you say bits in most other situations u use bytes

A bit is a single numeric value, either '1' or '0', that encodes a single unit of digital information. A byte is a sequence of bits; usually eight bits equal one byte.

The term BIT comes from the phrase Binary digIT and is represented by a 0 or 1. When a series of 1's or 0's are placed in a series they canbe used to represent a character - for example the letter A is represented in the binary equivalent 01000001 known as a byte.

A bit is the storage space needed to store 1 number in a binary string (i.e. 10100111001 would require 11 bits.) A byte, on the other hand, is usually defined as the storage space needed to store 1 character of text, which can vary from anywhere between 2 and 16 bits, depending on font, specs, etc. A byte is de facto defined as 8 bits. (1 bit = .125 bytes)

I'm pretty sure bytes are bigger than bits... 8 bits in a byte IIRC

1 byte = 8 bits

two different units of measurement

Yep, exactly. One reason why you've heard it both ways is that hard drives are usually measured in bytes, while things like internet speeds are usually measured in bits.

you have no clue what you are talking about. internet speed is measured in bytes. the isp try to muddy the issue but read your terms, they are bytes not bits. a 250gig cap a month on a say 7mbps connection is simple bs. do the math on what you are really entitled to. 60seconds x 60minutes = 3,600seconds x 24hours = 86,4000seconds x 7megabytes = 604,800megabytes a day or 604.8gigabytes a day. that is a bit higher than 250gigabytes a month. don't help the isp's muddy the waters on the issue.