gibibytes

A gibibyte (GiB) is a unit of digital information equal to 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. The term is part of a set of binary prefixes defined to distinguish powers of two from decimal prefixes used in most storage manufacturer specifications.

The prefix gibibyte is part of the IEC/ISO standard binary prefixes introduced to reduce confusion between traditional decimal prefixes and binary-based counts. Along with gibibyte, there are kibibytes (KiB), mebibytes (MiB), tebibytes (TiB), and so on. These prefixes correspond to powers of two: 2^10 (KiB), 2^20 (MiB), 2^30 (GiB), 2^40 (TiB), etc., and they are widely used in documentation for computer memory and related capacities.

In relation to the more familiar gigabyte (GB), 1 GiB equals 1,073,741,824 bytes, while 1 GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes. Therefore, 1 GiB is approximately 1.074 GB. Practically, GiB is commonly used when describing RAM and other binary-based capacities, whereas GB is often used in storage marketing. Some operating systems report disk and memory sizes in binary units, while others present decimal values; this can lead to apparent discrepancies when comparing capacities across devices.