Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
  • noun One billion bytes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun SI 109, one billion (1,000,000,000) bytes, as opposed to a gibibyte. SI symbol: GB
  • noun computing, colloquial Imprecisely, a gibibyte or 10243 (1,073,741,824) bytes. SI symbol: GiB, computing symbol: GB.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a unit of information equal to 1024 mebibytes or 2^30 (1,073,741,824) bytes
  • noun a unit of information equal to 1000 megabytes or 10^9 (1,000,000,000) bytes

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

giga- +‎ byte

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word gigabyte.

Examples

  • Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail have little reason to pay attention to the traffic caps: a gigabyte is about 3,000 Web pages, or 15,000 e-mails without attachments.

    Time Warner Cable Begins Testing Metered Internet In Texas - The Consumerist 2008

  • Albert Fert (born March 7, 1938) is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. binaryspiral

    EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson - This is awesome: FERT in the wild! 2008

  • The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary.

    Ars Technica Nate Anderson 2011

  • The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary.

    Ars Technica Nate Anderson 2011

  • They're also many times more expensive per gigabyte, which is why you don't see SSD technology in every computer on the market -- yet.

    Fool.com Headlines 2010

  • The gibibyte is closely related to the gigabyte, which is defined as 109 bytes =

    Original Signal - Transmitting Digg 2009

  • The gibibyte is closely related to the gigabyte, which is defined as 109 bytes =

    Original Signal - Transmitting Digg 2009

  • The gibibyte is closely related to the gigabyte, which is defined as 109 bytes =

    Original Signal - Transmitting Digg 2009

  • Ten years later, the cost was $1.15 per gigabyte, meaning that the cost had fallen by nearly a factor of 1000.

    Moore's Law for Storage, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary.

    Canada rethinks metered Internet, as U.S. pushes ahead Cecilia Kang 2011

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.