Gigabyte

Uncommon card · No. 82860

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 1073741824 (10243 or 230) bytes, however, particularly for sizes of RAM. Thus, some usage of gigabyte has been ambiguous. To resolve this, IEC 80000-13 states 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...

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