A gigabyte (GB) is a unit of digital information storage capacity that represents one billion bytes. It is commonly used to measure the size of digital files, data storage devices, and computer memory.
In terms of bytes, one gigabyte is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 2^30 bytes. However, in some contexts, especially when referring to storage devices marketed by manufacturers, a gigabyte may be defined as exactly one billion bytes (10^9 bytes), which can lead to slight discrepancies in reported storage capacities.
A gigabyte is often abbreviated as “GB” and is used to describe the size of files, such as documents, photos, videos, and software applications, as well as the storage capacity of devices like hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, and memory cards. For example, a typical DVD can hold about 4.7 GB of data, while a standard hard drive may have a capacity of several hundred gigabytes or even terabytes (1 TB = 1,024 GB).