Gigabyte
A gigabyte (GB) is a unit of information storage equal to 1,024 megabytes (MB) or 1,073,741,824 bytes. It is commonly used to measure the storage capacity of computer hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), RAM (Random Access Memory), USB flash drives, and other digital storage media.
The term "gigabyte" can sometimes be interpreted differently depending on context. Historically, in some operating systems and file systems, a gigabyte was approximated as 1,000,000,000 bytes (109 bytes) due to ease of calculation. This is technically a "decimal gigabyte" or a "SI gigabyte" and is sometimes referred to as a "GB" (with no "i"). However, the binary prefix "gibi" (symbol "GiB") was introduced to specifically represent 1,0243 bytes. Therefore, a true gigabyte, as defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), is more accurately represented as a gibibyte (GiB).
The difference between a gigabyte (GB) and a gibibyte (GiB) can lead to confusion. For example, a hard drive advertised as having a capacity of 1 TB (terabyte - decimal) may only show up as approximately 931 GiB (gibibytes) in an operating system that uses binary prefixes. This is because the manufacturer uses decimal prefixes for marketing purposes, while the operating system reports capacity using binary prefixes.
Gigabytes are a prevalent measure in modern computing and data storage. Large files like high-resolution videos, complex software applications, and extensive databases are often measured in gigabytes.