A gigabyte is a unit of measurement for data storage, equivalent to 1 billion bytes. It is part of a system of prefixes used to indicate orders of magnitude. A gibibyte is similar but based on a binary system and is often used to refer to memory capacity.
A gigabyte is a term for a defined value of the amount of data in relation to storage capacity or content. It refers to a quantity of something, usually data of some kind, often stored digitally. A gigabyte typically refers to 1 billion bytes. A gigabyte can potentially be confused with a gibibyte, which is also an amount of memory but is based on a binary or base two system.
The easiest way to understand the term “gigabyte” is to separate it into its two basic parts: “giga” and “byte”. A byte is data and is usually considered the smallest amount of data used to represent a single character in computer code. In other words, bytes are the individual building blocks of computer code. Each byte is made up of a number of bits, usually eight, and each bit is data that typically has one of two possible values: usually represented as 1 or 0.
Bits are the individual pieces of binary code that are grouped together, eight at a time, to make a single byte which then actually constitutes data in a larger sense. Thus, computer programs are made up of bytes and thus the size of a program is represented in terms of bytes. Just as a wall made of 100 bricks will be bigger than a wall made of 10 of the same bricks, a 100 byte program is bigger than a 10 byte one. Rather than expressing the size of large programs in thousands or millions, and now billions and trillions, of bytes, prefixes are used to indicate orders of magnitude.
These prefixes follow established notations of the International System of Units, similar to that used in metric measurements. Therefore 1,000 bytes are referred to as kilobytes, 1 million bytes is a megabyte, 1 billion bytes is a gigabyte, and 1 trillion bytes is a terabyte. These prefixes each indicate an order of magnitude by which bytes are being incremented and somewhat correspond to binary notation which uses similar terminology. It is because of this type of notation that a gigabyte can sometimes be confused with a gibibyte, which are similar but different in size.
A gibibyte is a size most often used to refer to the storage or processing capacity of memory, such as random access memory (RAM). This dimension is based on a binary or base-two system, where orders of magnitude are exponential increments of 10 based on two. In other words, 210 bytes is a kibibyte, 220 bytes is a mebibyte, and 330 bytes is a gibibyte. While this is close to a gigabyte, it’s not quite the same: a gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes; and has led to confusion regarding the actual storage sizes on hard drives and similar memory devices.
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