For example, a manufacturer might show the capacity of an HDD as 500 GB, but the computer reports the HDD's capacity as 466 GB.

base 10 (decimal) measurementsīecause of the differences between the two standards, users might see discrepancies on their systems in how the amount of storage is reported. However, the differences became more pronounced as vendors started manufacturing storage media with more capacity. In the early days of storage, this wasn't a significant issue because the discrepancy between the base 10 and base 2 measurements wasn't substantial. In this model, a gigabyte is sometimes referred to as a gibibyte, although not all vendors take this approach, thus the confusion. Today, most storage manufacturers and consumers use the base 10 standard to define a gigabyte.Ĭomputers and their operating systems often use the base 2, or binary, form of measurement, in which 1 GB equals 1,073,741,824 bytes. The base 10 definition of gigabyte uses the decimal system to show that 1 GB is equal to 10 9 bytes, or 1 billion bytes. The difference between the decimal amount and the binary amount has caused a fair amount of confusion among consumers, especially if they also come across such terms as kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte or tebibyte.Ĭomputer, storage and network systems use two standards to measure the number of bytes in a gigabyte: base 10 and base 2. Today's HDDs and flash SSDs can easily store hundreds of gigabytes of data or even thousands, which is why the TB label has been steadily replacing GB in many instances. In recent years, terabytes ( TB) have become a more common unit of storage capacity measurement, especially for hard disk drives ( HDDs) and solid-state drives ( SSDs).Ĭloud providers and hardware vendors still often refer to storage capacity costs in terms of the amount per gigabyte, although that's been slowly transitioning to costs per terabyte. Werner Buchholz is credited with coining the term byte in 1956, while helping design IBM's 7030 Stretch, the first transistorized supercomputer.Ī gigabyte has been a common unit of capacity measurement for data storage products since the mid-1980s. Giga comes from a Greek word meaning giant. In binary notation (base 2), a gigabyte is equal to 2 30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. In decimal notation (base 10), a gigabyte is exactly 1 billion bytes. Stacey Peterson, Senior Managing EditorĪ gigabyte (GB) - pronounced with two hard Gs - is a unit of data storage capacity that is roughly equivalent to 1 billion bytes.

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