Difference between Gigabyte and Gibibyte (GB vs GiB)

Understanding the difference between GB and GiB

Major Differences between Gigabyte and Gibibyte

Gigabyte Gibibyte
Unit symbol : GB Unit symbol : GiB
A Decimal Unit defined by International System of Units (SI)A Binary Unit defined by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
defined as 109 or 10003 Bytesdefined as 230 or 10243 Bytes
equal to 1,000,000,000 Bytesequal to 1,073,741,824 Bytes

What is Gigabyte (GB)?

As per International System of Units (SI), the prefix giga means 109. Therefore, one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 or One Billion bytes. Gigabyte is represented by GB.

256 GB Hard Disk Drive

The Hard disk manufactures often mention the capacity of the drives in Gigabytes.( 128GB, 256GB, 500GB etc.)

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What is Gibibyte (GiB)?

Gibi is one of the binary prefix defined by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1988. The unit symbol for Gibibyte is GiB. The value of gibi is 220 , there for one Gibibyte is equal to 1,073,741,824 Bytes. You can see this is comparatively larger than 1 GB.

So if we convert the size of above Hard disk drives (128GB, 250GB, 500GB) to Gibibyte, that will be ~119.2GiB, ~238.4GiB, ~465.7GiB respectively.

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Convert Gigabyte(GB) to Gibibyte(GiB) and vice versa

Use below tools to convert from Gigabyte(GB) to Gibibyte(GiB) or vice versa.