What Is a Gigabyte?

A gigabyte is a unit of measure used to state how much data can be stored on a hard drive.

What is a Byte?

A byte is a collection of bits. Usually there are eight bits in a byte. A bit is a 0 or 1 and the basis for the binary (two number) system that computers are based on.

How Many Bytes in a Gigabyte?

A gigabyte is 1024^3 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes. To avoid confusion, most people estimate and say that a gigabyte is 1000^3 bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Why 1024?

While the decimal system is based in tens, computers know binary, which has only two numbers. Two to the power of ten is 1024.

What Devices are Measured in Gigabytes?

The most common devices measured in gigabytes are memory devices such as hard drives, RAM, jump drives and digital memory cards.

What Other Common Measures Are Based on Bytes?

A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, and a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes.