2024-04-19

gigabyte

Gigabyte to Terabytes

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM02 mins

For fun, here is a comparison of some old storage media with something in our data recovery lab right now.

Gigabyte-to-Terabytes

On the left is an IBM 3380 ‘direct storage access device’ circa 1980. Capacity: 1 GB. On the right, a RAID recovery on one of our lab workbenches, set up in a couple of storage cases.
Capacity: 48 TB.

The cases and the old IBM device are about the same size… ~30cm across, but of course 30 years difference.

Gigabyte:

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte fordigital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units (SI), therefore 1 gigabyte is1000000000 bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB or Gbyte, but not Gb (lower case b) which is typically used for the gigabit.

Terabytes:

The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore 1 terabyte is 1000000000000 bytes, or 1trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB or TByte, but not Tb(lower case b) which refers to terabit.

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What is a Megabyte (MB) and Gigabyte (GB)?

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM02 mins

Hard Drive Capacity Defining how hard drive manufacturers and operating system interpret megabytes and gigabytes.

Hard Drive Manufacturer Capacity Definitions
The listed capacity is an unformatted (raw) capacity. After partitioning and formatting, actual storage capacities may vary depending on the operating system and configuration. Maxtor adheres to the NIST and IEC definitions of Megabyte and Gigabyte.

Examples:
1 MB = One Million Bytes
1 GB = One Billion Bytes

Operating System & BIOS Capacity Definitions
Storage devices are marketed and sold in terms of decimal (base 10) capacity. In decimal terms, one Gigabyte (GB) is equal to one billion bytes. Most BIOS is follow this definition as well. However, many operating systems use the binary (base 2) numbering system. That would be two to the thirtieth power, or 1,073,741,824 bytes which equals one binary-Gigabyte (also called Gibibyte or GiB).

According to the NIST and IEC standards, an 80 GB hard drive would contain eighty billion bytes. 80,000,000,000 bytes divided by 1,000,000,000 bytes equals eighty decimal Gigabytes. In binary terms, 80,000,000,000 bytes would be divided by 1,073,741,824 for a total of 74.5 binary GB. However, there are still 80 billion bytes on the drive in either case.

Some utilities use abinary conversion to calculate capacity. This is why users might see 504 MB reported on one utility and 528 MB from another.

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