What is the full form of GB?

Introduction

Giga Bytes (GB) is the storage capacity of any hard drive. One gigabyte is equal to ‘1 billion bytes’ or ‘2³⁰ bytes’.

The word “Giga” comes from the Greek word, “Ghigas” which means ‘giant’. Gigabytes came into existence for measuring capacity in the 1980s. It determines the storage size of hard drives like HDD, SDD, pen drives, etc.

Definition of GB

“Giga Byte” is defined as several units of bytes. In the international system Unit (SI unit), its value is 109. It is denoted by the symbol ‘GB’. It is a measuring unit of data in computer and digital media storage. One unit of gigabytes is equal to 1 billion units of bytes or 1000 units of megabytes. It is also written as gigs.

• It defines the measuring capacity of hard drives, data transmission speed, RAM, etc.

• An HDD drive can save up to 500 GB of data.

• A DVD can save up to 4.7 GB of data.

• One Tera byte is equal to 1000 GB.

Differences between GB and other units

A computer stores data in some hardware. These are known as memory devices. In computers, memory is of two types volatile and non-volatile memory. The memory of several types primary, secondary, and cache memory. The data in memories are saved in the form of units. These units are made of bits, which are the smallest unit of data storage.

1 bit	0 or, 1 binary unit
1 byte	8 bits
1 KB	1024 bytes
1 MB	1024 KB
1 GB	1024 MB
1 TB	1024 GB

• These all are data storage units. The main difference between Giga bytes and other units is their size.

• One unit of a Giga byte is more than other units like MB, KB, Bytes etc and smaller than Tera byte.

• One unit of Gigabytes contains 1 billion units of bytes, while one MB is equal to 1 million units of bytes.

Common uses of GB

The giga bytes are the storage quantity of any data in a hard drive. It also determines the transmission capacity of data transfer in fibre optics. There are some common uses for Gigabytes. These are;

• One gigabyte is equal to more than 50 thousand emails without any attachments.

• A 1-gigabyte hard drive or pen drive can store approx 300 photographs of 10 Megapixel photos.

• A CD can save 114 minutes of audio files, a DVD can store approx 7 GB of data and blue -a ray disc can save approx 20 GB of data in it.

• An HDD drive is used for high storage data, their capacities are around 100 GB to 1000 GB, and their capacities are measured in terabytes.

• An SSD drive can also hold a high amount of data, they are available in different sizes of 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB.

• It is used in the Random access memory of a system. It defines what is the size of internal memory and how fast a computer can transmit the data.

• It also determines how much data you can stream in 1GB of internet data.

Historical development of GB

The term gigabytes become common nowadays. Earlier it was not so common. The data in electronic devices are stored in the form of bits. Bits are the basic unit of storage, which is detonated by 0, and 1. It denotes an on-and-off switch.

• In 1956 during IBM’s experiment IBM’s first transistorized supercomputer “Werner Buchholz” coined the bytes for the first time. Later in 1986, Gigabyte technology came into existence.

• Now gigabytes will soon replace by terabytes as storage capacity and space in the cloud are becoming needed nowadays with the advent of technologies.

• The first-gigabyte hard drive was launched in 1980 by IBM, which is “IBM 3380”

• In 1991, the first 1 GB hard drive was launched.

Conclusion

Gigabytes are the storage ability of a device. When we think about storing our data like files, photos and media, we check the storage ability of hard drives. Storing data up to 8 to 16 GB was quite genuine earlier but now the demand for more storage has increased. One gigabyte of RAM in any operating system was quite authentic. It works for all of us. But now for both storage and data transmission high GB of data is required. Gigabytes are several billion units of bytes. These are used in storage hard drives, HDD, SDD, CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. The higher GB RAM can boost the speed of data transmission and your system work smoothly.

FAQs

Q1. What is Gigabits, How is it different from Gigabytes?

“Gigabits” are referred to as the data that is being transmitted over a network. In internet connection we talk of the speed of the network is fast and slow. This speed is measured in Gbps i.e. Gigabits per second.

Gigabytes are the storage capacity of hard drives. For example, the storage ability of a PC, Mobile, or hard drive is measured in gigabytes.

Q2. What is gigahertz?

Gigahertz is the speed of data transmission. One gigahertz is defined as 1 billion cycles per second. It determines the rate of central processing unit performance (CPU) i.e. how many operations a CPU can do in a second. More the capacity of the CPU in gigahertz more smoothly a system work.

Q3. What are Peta bytes and Exabytes?

Peta and Exa bytes are also storage capacities of a hard drive. One Peta byte is equal to 1024 TB and One Exa byte is equal to 1024 Peta bytes.