gigabyte
Pluralgigabytes
- 1A unit of digital information equal to one billion bytes, or one thousand megabytes.
The software update downloaded nearly two gigabytes overnight.
Each gigabyte of cloud storage costs only a few cents per month.
Note
The strict metric reading, in which giga- keeps its exact value of a billion: IBM's 1981 storage guide spelled 2.5 gigabytes out as "billion bytes." Drive makers count this way, while the same name is used loosely for the binary gibibyte of 2³⁰ bytes, which is slightly larger. As a measure before a noun it takes a hyphen and stays singular: a 20-gigabyte cap, priced at $1 a gigabyte.
The plan comes with a 20-gigabyte monthly cap.
Above the cap, extra data costs a dollar a gigabyte.
- 2A unit of digital information equal to 2³⁰ bytes (1,073,741,824), the binary value more precisely called a gibibyte.
The file manager listed the video as exactly one gigabyte, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
The server was fitted with 64 gigabytes of RAM, a total of 68,719,476,736 bytes.
Similargibibyte
Note
Memory is where this informal reading lives, because chips are built in powers of two. That is why 64 gigabytes of RAM means the binary count. The clash with the billion-byte meaning shows up on new drives: they are sold by the decimal unit, so they look smaller once a computer counts them the binary way. Where the difference matters, write gibibyte for this value and keep gigabyte for the decimal one.
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Origin
Formed from the prefix giga- combined with byte.