A gigabit (symbol Gb) is a unit of measure for data transfer or storage equal to one billion decimal bits or 1,073,741,824 binary bits.
Because of the relationship of bits to bytes (8 bits = 1 byte), it is a significant difference in overall storage quantity should the two nomenclatures be confused. Typically, bytes are used for physical storage (eg. 20 GB capacity), while bits are used for throughput or bandwidth ratings (eg. 400 Mb/s transfer rate).
External links[]
- Gigabit at the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing
- Gigabit at Wikipedia