GiBs

A gibibyte, abbreviated GiB and sometimes written gibibyte, is a unit of digital information equal to 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. It is part of the binary prefixes defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to distinguish binary powers from decimal prefixes used in everyday measurements.

By contrast, a decimal gigabyte (GB) equals 10^9 bytes, or 1,000,000,000 bytes. Therefore, 1 GiB is approximately 1.0737 GB, and 1 GB is about 0.931 GiB. This difference means that capacities labeled in GB on storage devices can appear smaller when measured in GiB by a computer’s file system, and vice versa.

The set of binary prefixes, including KiB, MiB, GiB, and TiB, was introduced to provide precise binary-based measurements for memory and storage. In practice, consumer devices and marketing materials often use decimal GB, which can contribute to confusion between values reported by operating systems and by manufacturers.

Examples: a drive advertised as 500 GiB contains 500 × 1,073,741,824 bytes = 536,870,912,000 bytes, which is about 536.9 GB in decimal terms. A tebibyte (TiB) equals 1,024 GiB. The term “gibi” is derived from the binary prefix for 2^10, and the unit is used to specify exact binary-based quantities of data.