Re: What's a Gigabyte?



Daniel James wrote:

In article news:<5ov42sFo5hggU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Adrian C wrote:
One Billion Bytes *is* the industry accepted definition of a Gigabyte.

For some value of "Billion", anyway. Some of us prefer to refer to a thousand
million as a "milliard" -- which is the proper and unambiguous term for it. The
trouble with "billion" is that it can mean either a thousand million or a
million million. In the USA it is invariably used to mean a thousand million,
but in most European countries it means a million million ... and this does
still lead to confusion. Best avoid "billion" altogether.

.. but as for "Gigabyte" ... the prefix "Giga" is an internationally
recognized SI prefix meaning 10^9. That's what it means. A Gigabyte is
therefore 10^9 bytes. End of story.

The proper term for 2^30 bytes is a Gibibyte. Don't confuse them.

See, e.g. http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

This may be an attempt to standardize to avoid confusion, but I doubt it
will have any success. Have you ever seen memory advertised as mebi or gibi?

Just accept that everything Giga is 10^9, apart from digital memory which
is organised in a binary matrix, hence will always be a size of power of 2.
.

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