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A gigabyte (symbol GB) is a unit of measurement in computers of one thousand million bytes (the same as one billion bytes in the short scale usage), 1000 megabytes.
Because of irregularities in definition and usage of the kilobyte, the exact number in common practice could be either of the following:
See integral data type.
A terabyte is either equal to 1024 gigabytes or to 1000 gigabytes depending on the usages.
As of 2004, most consumer hard drives are measured in gigabyte-range capacities. Per-gigabyte costs are 50-80 cents USD.
In speech, gigabyte is often abbreviated to gig, as in "This is a ten-gig hard drive". The initial G in giga- is usually pronounced hard as in geek, not soft as in giant. However, in the 1985 movie Back to the Future, the term giga was pronounced with a soft g sound, as jiga, in the word gigawatts.
A gigabit, which should not be confused with gigabyte, is 1/8th of a gigabyte and is mainly used to describe bandwidth, e.g. 2 gigabit/s is the speed of current Fibre Channel interfaces. Gigabits are almost always of the 109 variety.
To clarify the distinction between decimal and binary prefixes, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), a standards body, in 1997 proposed short unions of the International System of Units (SI) prefixes with the word "binary". Thus meaning (2) would be called a gibibyte (GiB). This naming convention has not yet been widely accepted.
The prefix "giga" comes from the Greek word γίγας (gigas) meaning "giant", and was chosen because 109 can be described as a "gigantic" number.
To convert metric gigabytes into binary gigabytes (for example a 100GB drive contains 93GiB when installed), follow this mathematical procedure:
These numbers were taken from .
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