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Gigabyte

Gigabyte

Gigabyte: a metric unit of storage measurement equal to one billion bytes.

Gigabyte is the metric equivalent of the Gibibyte, using the power of ten instead of two,〖10〗^9 to be specific. Because of this it totals 1, 000, 000, 000 bytes instead of the SI amount.

Instead of being defined by the Binary system of measurement, it follows the metric scale and is denoted by the symbol GB.

Like the Gibibyte, it is the third multiple in the series, but in this case it is a multiple of 1000 instead of 1024, making it about 7% smaller than the Gibibyte.

This means when looking at the basic formula for each- 〖1000〗^3 for Giga and 〖1024〗^3 for Gibi- the conversion can be seen as GiB= 1.074 GB. It comes after the Mebibyte, but before the Tebibyte.

One has to be careful when dealing with the metric and binary systems, because the two measurements are different amounts and therefore not interchangeable, meaning a mistake can have dangerous consequences in terms of what can be stored or in data calculation.

A simple way of looking at it is that the base for both is the bit, followed by the byte which is 8 times the size of the bit.

After that, each metric measurement is 1000 times the previous term, and each binary unit is 1024 times the size of the previous unit.  Note that the Gigabyte is on the binary scale, which is an SI standard of measurement.

Like other measuring units, it has an IEC counterpart, which measures on the binary scale of powers of two, instead of the metric scale using multiples of ten. This binary counterpart is the Gibibyte.

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