The kilobyte is a more convenient unit of measure than the byte, but rapid advances in computing technology made it difficult to work with as well. Computer manufacturers began developing equipment with capacities of many thousands of kilobytes. Once again, computer scientists used a variation of the metric system to save the day. A thousand kilobytes is referred to as a megabyte. Modern floppy drives often have a capacity of roughly 1,440 K. This value is often referred to as 1.44 M. The term Megabyte is often abbreviated Meg, M, or Mb. Disk drives and memory capacity are often measured in megabytes.