Gigabyte (abbreviated as GB) is a unit for measuring digital information, specifically 1024 megabytes (MB) or 1,073,741,824 bytes of data. A gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte, which is the most commonly used unit for measuring digital information. It is often used to measure the size of computer files, such as the total memory of a hard drive, the amount of storage space available on a computer’s hard drive, and the amount of memory contained on a memory card or flash drive.
A gigabyte is also used to measure the amount of data transferred each second. This is commonly referred to as “bandwidth”, and is usually expressed in megabits per second (Mbps). For example, a network connection with a download speed of 10 megabits per second (10 Mbps) is equivalent to 1.25 megabytes (1.25 MB) per second, or 1,250,000 bytes per second.
Gigabyte is also used to describe a unit of computer memory, which is based on a power of two. For example, a computer may use 4 gigabytes of RAM, meaning that the computer’s memory consists of 4,294,967,296 bytes of storage.
In addition to its use for measuring data storage and bandwidth, the term “gigabyte” has become popularly used to refer to close to a thousand bytes of data in general. For example, someone might describe an especially large file as being “in the gigabytes”, even if the file’s exact size is not known.
