gigabyte
Sign in to saveThe gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.
AI overview
A gigabyte (GB) is a unit of digital storage or data equal to one billion bytes, with the prefix "giga" meaning one billion in the standard measurement system. This unit matters because it's commonly used to describe the size of files, storage capacity, and data transfer, making it easy to talk about large amounts of digital information in everyday terms.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Unit.name
- gigabyte
- Unit.image
- Laptop-hard-drive-exposed.jpg
- Unit.caption
- This 2.5-inch hard drive has a capacity of 500 gigabytes (GB) of data (i.e., 500 billion bytes).
- Unit.standard
- Unit derived from bit
- Unit.quantity
- Digital information, data size
- Unit.symbol
- GB
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
11 sectionsContents
- Definition
- Base 10 (decimal)
- Base 2 (binary)
- Consumer confusion
- US lawsuits
- Other contexts
- Examples of gigabyte-sized storage
- Unicode character
- See also
- References
- External links
The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.
This definition is used in all contexts of science (especially data science), engineering, business, and many areas of computing, including storage capacities of hard drives, solid-state drives, and tapes, as well as data transmission speeds. The term is also used in some fields of computer science and information technology to denote (10243 or 230) bytes, however, particularly for sizes of RAM. Thus, some usage of gigabyte has been ambiguous. To resolve this difficulty, IEC 80000-13 clarifies that a gigabyte (GB) is 109 bytes and specifies the term gibibyte (GiB) to denote 230 bytes. These differences are still readily seen, for example, when a 400 GB drive's capacity is displayed by Microsoft Windows as 372 GB instead of 372 GiB. Analogously, a memory module that is labeled as having the size "" has one gibibyte () of storage capacity.