GB vs GiB

GB vs GiB, What is the difference?

In case you have purchased a 1 TB hard drive and you have attached it to your laptop, you will be surprised to find that your laptop OS is showing the device as 931 GiB of usable space.

What is this GiB? Is it not GB? Like why not 1000 GB or why it is 931 GiB?

This is because your operating system is calculating the available storage based on the binary system (GiB) rather than the decimal system (GB)

GB (gigabyte) is based on the decimal system (1000)
GiB (gibibyte) is based on the binary system (1024).

This means 1 GB = 10^9 =1,000,000,000 bytes
while 1 GiB=2^32 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.

The difference is about 7%, with 1 GiB being slightly larger than 1 GB.

Also, for comparison.

1 GB = 0.93 GiB
1 GiB = 1.073 GB
1 TB = 0.91 TiB
1 TiB = 1024 GiB
1 TiB = 1.1 TB

This is very basic. But I once had this confusion with that extra "i". Hope this helps someone.

hashtag#LearnWithSurya hashtag#DevOpswithSurya hashtag#Storage hashtag#HDD hashtag#SDD hashtag#StorageDevices hashtag#Computing