What are gigabytes?

Answer 1

A gigabyte (GB) is a unit of computer memory or data storage capacity.

Officially, it is equal to 1,000 megabytes (MB), or 1,000,000,000 (109) bytes. This is the way it is used for hard drives, DVDs and other media, networking bandwidth, and by Mac OS X and Linux for disk and file sizes:

• 1 bit = a single "zero or one" data state
• 1 byte = 8 bits
• 1 kilobyte = 1,000 bytes {kilo- = thousand}
• 1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes {mega- = million}
• 1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes {giga- = billion}
• 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes {tera- = trillion}

Unofficially, the term "gigabyte" is often used as an approximation for a power of two: 230 bytes. This is more properly called a "gigabinary byte" or "gibibyte" (GiB), but people continue to use it incorrectly. In this usage, it is equal to 1,024 "mebibytes" or 1,073,741,824 bytes. This is commonly used by computer memory manufacturers and in Microsoft Windows for disk and file sizes:

• 1 kibibyte (KiB) = 1,024 bytes {kibi- = kilobinary}
• 1 mebibyte (MiB) = 1,024 × 1,024 bytes {mebi- = megabinary}
• 1 gibibyte (GiB) = 1,024 × 1,024 × 1,024 bytes {gibi- = gigabinary}
• 1 tebibyte (TiB) = 1,024 × 1,024 × 1,024 × 1,024 bytes {tebi- = terabinary}

A common urban legend is that hard drive manufacturers switched from measuring in multiples of 1024 to multiples of 1000 in order to inflate their specs. In fact, hard drives have always been measured in multiples of 1000, since they were first produced. For instance, the introduction of the 1974 Winchester HDD used "Mbyte" to mean 1,000,000 bytes.

It's only with increasing hard drives sizes that the difference between Microsoft's non-standard measurements and the manufacturer's standard measurements has become significant.

Using "GB" for 1,000,000,000 bytes and "GiB" for 1,073,741,824 bytes eliminates any such confusion.
Gigabyte is a term used to refer to an amount of storage on a computer hard disk or ram. It can also be a speed as well, for example your hard drive may transfer 1 gigabyte per second (which is extremely fast). A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes.
It defines 1 billion bytes. A byte being a single unit of computer code which itself contains 8 bits.

The term is generally used today to define computer memory, such as my computer has 8 gigabytes of RAM which is computer memory.

Answer 2

A GigaByte is a unit of measure for the size of say, a file, folder, Hard Drive, Ram, etc.

1024 GigaBytes (GB) makes up 1 TeraByte (TB)

1024 MegaBytes (MB) is 1 Gigabyte (GB)

1024 KiloBytes is 1 Megabyte (MB)

Answer 3

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage.The prefix giga means 10 power of 9 therefore 1 gigabyte is 1000000000bytes.

Answer 4

A gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. The prefix "giga" comes from the Greek word "gigas," meaning giant.

Hope this help