Gigatavujen

Gigatavujen is the Finnish term for the storage unit gigabyte. The form gigatavujen is the genitive plural used when describing quantities, for example "gigatavujen määrä". A gigatavu (GB) can refer to either 1,000,000,000 bytes (decimal) or 1,073,741,824 bytes (binary).

The decimal definition follows the SI prefix giga- (10^9), while the binary interpretation is associated with 2^30 bytes and is more precisely called a gibibyte (GiB). In common Finnish usage, GB is used for decimal values, but many users encounter binary values in operating systems and file sizes, which leads to confusion.

Examples: A hard drive labeled as 1 TB typically contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes; when viewed in binary units, that capacity is about 931 GiB. Similarly, a 500 GB file may be about 465 GiB in binary terms.

In Finnish documentation, the distinction is sometimes described as GB for decimal and GiB for binary, while "gigatavu" remains the general term for the unit. For precision, it is advisable to specify whether the value is in GB or GiB. See also gibibyte (GiB) for the binary counterpart and related discussions of byte-based units.