Gigabyte (GB)

 

What is a gigabyte (GB)?

A gigabyte (GB) -- pronounced with two hard Gs -- is a unit of data storage capacity that is roughly equivalent to 1 billion bytes. In decimal notation (base 10), a gigabyte is exactly 1 billion bytes. In binary notation (base 2), a gigabyte is equal to 230 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. Giga comes from a Greek word meaning giant. Werner Buchholz is credited with coining the term byte in 1956, while helping design IBM's 7030 Stretch, the first transistorized supercomputer.

A gigabyte has been a common unit of capacity measurement for data storage products since the mid-1980s. 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).

Cloud 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. 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.

How long does it take to use 1 GB of data?

With today's data-intensive workloads, a gigabyte of data can be used up quickly. A single-layer digital video disk (DVD) can hold only 4.7 GB of data, and a double-layer disc can hold only 8.5 GB, a drop in the bucket compared to a 10 TB HDD. Even a typical laptop or desktop computer contains only 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM.

In more concrete terms, one gigabyte of data is equal to:

• 250 downloaded songs;
• 6,180 sent and received emails;
• 250 10-megapixel photos;
• 50,000 average emails with no attachments;
• 3,333 average emails with standard-sized attachments;
• 5 hours of standard-definition movies; or
• 353 one-minute YouTube videos.