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< Flash | Knowledge Base | GNOME >

Sartre's take on the matter.

Theoretically, a gigabyte is exactly one short-billion 1,000,000,000 (1000³) bytes. However the term is often used to refer to 1,073,741,824 (1024³) bytes due to disagreement over the precise meaning of the prefix "giga-". This has lead to disagreement and contradictory use of the size units "megabyte", "gigabyte" and so forth.

The SI prefix nomenclature dictates that "giga-" means 1000³, however the binary prefix nomenclature dictates that "giga-" means 1024³.

Because of their binary (base two) nature, computer storage has been measured in multiples of 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes because 1024 is 2¹° (2¹⁰=1024³). Since there was no existing prefix for this term, computer scientists stole the SI prefix "kilo", which properly refers to exactly 1000, creating the term "kilobyte" (and by analogy "megabyte", "gigabyte", etc). This did not cause a problem for a while, because computer scientists knew what they where talking about. Then computers spread outside the ivory towers of academia... confusion reigned.

The term "gigabyte", in particular is subject to considerable controversy because hard-disc manufacturers tend to calculate a gigabyte as being 1000³ bytes, the operating systems calculate a gigabyte as 1024³ bytes. This can lead to operating systems reporting discs advertised at one capacity as being another. Lawsuits have arisen because of this

Adding to the already immense confusion, the telecommunications industry only uses gigabyte to mean 1000³ bytes and RAM manufacturers calculate a gigabyte as being 1024³ bytes.

To ameliorate the chaos, the IEC has proposed the creation of the new, non-ambiguous prefixes "kibi-", "mebi-" and "gibi-" (etc) to refer to the binary interpretations of the prefixes, thus:

This scheme has been endorsed by various government and professional bodies and has utterly failed to take off, largely because no-one can say "Gibibyte" without tittering.

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