Gigabyte

Not to be confused with Gibibyte.

The gigabyte (GB) is a unit of measurement in computers and similar electronic devices. It means exactly one billion bytes, usually referring to the number of bytes in a computer hard drive. It is often incorrectly used to mean 1 073 741 824 (2³⁰) bytes, especially when referring to the random access memory (RAM) of a modern computer.

Definitions

Nowadays, international standards bodies say the gigabyte should only be used to mean exactly 1 billion bytes, and that gibibyte is a better name for 1 073 741 824 bytes. In everyday use, people use gigabyte to mean 1 073 741 824 bytes when talking about computer memory and 1 000 000 000 bytes when talking about computer disk space. One thousand gigabytes make one terabyte.

Applications

This measurement is often used when measuring the capacity of computer memory, hard drives, or other storage devices.