Meaning – The term gigabyte, refers to the subunit of the standard unit of measurement for digital storage – byte. The prefix ‘giga’ corresponds to the 10^9 power and mathematically, a single gigabyte equates to one billion bytes.
Today, most files that are large in size measure in Gigabytes, while some are even bigger, in terabytes.
This definition is used in all contexts of science, engineering, business, and many areas of computing, including hard drive, solid state drive, and tape capacities, as well as data transmission speeds. However, the term is also used in some fields of computer science and information technology to denote 1073741824(1024^3 or 2^30) bytes, particularly for sizes of RAM.
Example of usage – “The gamer purchased a new game, but was shocked to find out that the file available for download was in Gigabytes, and he would have to leave the download open overnight, in order to finish the process.”
