Gigabyte

This article is about the unit of measurement. For the computer hardware manufacturer, see Gigabyte Technology. For the cartoon character, see ReBoot. For the virus writer, see Gigabyte (virus writer).

Multiple-byte units
Decimal Value Metric 1000 103 kB kilobyte 10002 106 MB megabyte 10003 109 GB gigabyte 10004 1012 TB terabyte 10005 1015 PB petabyte 10006 1018 EB exabyte 10007 1021 ZB zettabyte 10008 1024 YB yottabyte 10009 1027 RB ronnabyte 100010 1030 QB quettabyte	Binary Value IEC Memory 1024 210 KiB kibibyte KB kilobyte 10242 220 MiB mebibyte MB megabyte 10243 230 GiB gibibyte GB gigabyte 10244 240 TiB tebibyte TB terabyte 10245 250 PiB pebibyte – 10246 260 EiB exbibyte – 10247 270 ZiB zebibyte – 10248 280 YiB yobibyte – 10249 290 – – 102410 2100 – –
Orders of magnitude of data

The gigabyte (/ˈɡɪɡəbaɪt/ GIG-ə-byt or /ˈdʒɪɡəbaɪt/) 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 1000000000bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.

Historically, the term has also been used in some fields of computer science and information technology to denote the gibibyte, or 1073741824 (1024³ or 2³⁰) bytes. For instance, the memory standards of JEDEC, a semiconductor trade and engineering society, define memory sizes in this way.

In almost all contexts in computing, science, engineering and business, the SI prefix giga- is used as specified in the International System of Units (SI), that is, as a decimal multiplier. In computing, examples of this are disk capacities (often stated explicitly on the manufacturer's product labels), units in the telecommunications and computer networking industries, processor speeds and number of pixels in very large images. However, when referring to RAM sizes, it has sometimes been used to mean 1024³, i.e. as an alias for the unambiguous and standard-based prefix gibi- (gibibyte). File systems and software sometimes display that binary usage for list file sizes or free space.

In order to eliminate the ambiguity, the International Electrotechnical Commission has implemented standard multiplier prefixes for quantities expressed in binary multiples. The standard is endorsed by all standards organizations, including the IEEE, the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), but the binary prefixes have seen limited usage. The JEDEC industry consortium continues to permit the IEEE 100 nomenclature of using the metric prefixes kilo, mega and giga in their binary interpretation for memory manufacturing designations, but have endorsed the binary prefixes.

Definition

This 2.5" hard drive can hold 500GB of data.

The term gigabyte is commonly used to mean either 1000³ bytes or 1024³ bytes. This originated as compromise technical jargon for the byte multiples that needed to be expressed by the powers of 2 but lacked a convenient name. As 1024 (2¹⁰) approximates 1000 (10³), roughly corresponding SI multiples, it was used for binary multiples as well. In 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published standards for binary prefixes and requiring the use of gigabyte to strictly denote 1000³ bytes and gibibyte to denote 1024³ bytes. By the end of 2007, the IEC Standard had been adopted by the IEEE, EU, and NIST, and in 2009 they were incorporated in the International System of Quantities. Nevertheless, the term gigabyte continues to be widely used with the following two different meanings:

Base 10 definition

• 1 GB = 1000000000 bytes (= 1000³ B = 10⁹ B) is the definition recommended by the International System of Units (SI) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This definition is used in networking contexts and most storage media, particularly hard drives, Flash-based storage, and DVDs, and is also consistent with the other uses of the SI prefix in computing, such as CPU clock speeds or measures of performance. The Mac OS X file manager from version 10.6 and higher is a notable example of this usage in software. Since Snow Leopard, file sizes are reported in decimal units.

Base 2 definition

• 1 GiB = 1073741824 bytes (= 1024³ B = 2³⁰ B) is the definition used by Microsoft Windows in reference to computer memory (e.g., RAM). This definition is synonymous with the unambiguous IEC standard name gibibyte.

Consumer confusion

Since the early 2000s, disk drive manufacturers based most consumer hard drive capacities in certain size classes measured in decimal gigabytes. The exact capacity of a given drive model is close to the class designation. Most manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices define one gigabyte as 1000000000bytes, which is displayed on the packaging. Some operating systems now express hard drive capacity or file size using decimal multipliers (integer powers of 1000), while others , such as Microsoft Windows, still report size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes by 1073741824 (2³⁰ bytes= 1 gibibyte), while still reporting the result with the symbol GB. This discrepancy causes confusion, as a disk with an advertised capacity of, for example, 400 GB (meaning 400000000000bytes) might be reported by the operating system as 372 GB, meaning 372 GiB. Other software, like Mac OS X 10.6 and some components of the Linux kernel measure in decimal units. The JEDEC memory standards use the IEEE 100 nomenclatures which define a gigabyte as 1073741824bytes (or 2³⁰ bytes).

The difference between units based on decimal and binary prefixes increases as a semi-logarithmic (linear-log) function—for example, the decimal kilobyte value is nearly 98% of the kibibyte, a megabyte is under 96% of a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% of a gibibyte value. This means that a 300 GB (279 GiB) hard disk might be indicated variously as 300 GB, 279 GB or 279 GiB, depending on the operating system. As storage sizes increase and larger units are used, these differences become even more pronounced. Some legal challenges have been waged over this confusion such as a suit against Western Digital. Western Digital settled the challenge and added explicit disclaimers to products that the usable capacity may differ from the advertised capacity.

Because of its physical design, the capacity of modern computer random access memory devices, such as DIMM modules, is always a multiple of a power of 1024. It is thus convenient to use prefixes denoting powers of 1024, known as binary prefixes, in describing them. For example, a memory capacity of 1073741824bytes is conveniently expressed as 1 GiB rather than as 1.074 GB. The former specification is, however, almost always quoted as 1 GB when applied to random access memory.

Software allocates memory in varying degrees of granularity as needed to fulfill data structure requirements and binary multiples are usually not required. Other computer measurements, like storage hardware size, data transfer rates, clock speeds, operations per second, etc., do not depend on an inherent base, and are usually presented in decimal units. For example, the manufacturer of a "300 GB" hard drive is claiming a capacity of 300000000000bytes, not 300x1024³ (which would be 322122547200).

Examples of gigabyte-sized storage

• One hour of SDTV video at 2.2 Mbit/s is approximately 1 GB.
• Seven minutes of HDTV video at 19.39 Mbit/s is approximately 1 GB.
• 114 minutes of uncompressed CD-quality audio at 1.4 Mbit/s is approximately 1 GB.
• A DVD-R can hold about 4.7 GB.
• A dual-layered Blu-ray disc can hold about 50 GB.

See also

• Orders of magnitude (data)
• Binary prefix

External links

• http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
• http://www.quinion.com/words/turnsofphrase/tp-kib1.htm
• http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/tb9903.htm