With the development of computer technology, new terms appear annually. Many often use the word "gigabyte", but they do not fully understand the meaning of this concept, because of which they can not answer the question of whether the amount of memory in 1 GB is how much.
What is a gigabyte?
Before dealing with the issue of “1 GB is a lot or a little,” you need to understand the essence of a unit of memory. Most electronic devices use pulse current processing. This method allows you to process a large amount of information in a short time and has only two meanings - "Yes" or "No". This minimum informative unit is called a bit.
Using bits in a computer, all the necessary data is set - texts, pictures, sound, and so on. To increase the processing speed of pulses, it was decided to break the entire stream into groups - one set of 8 bits was called a byte. With the development of technology, it was necessary to work with an increasing amount of data, which is why new divisions into larger groups began to appear.
To simplify the process of understanding the number of bits in a given value, it was decided to use prefixes from the SI unit system. As a result of this, kilobits, megabytes and other values of the memory volume appeared. But, according to the unified SI system, the value of each prefix was a factor in the form of the number 10 to a certain extent. And computer information, due to its duality, is represented as a deuce to some extent. Because of this, when accurately determining a smaller value, one often encounters disagreement. Despite the contradictions in the exact determination of the number of bits, differences in the values for consoles with a small difference are not significant. So, according to these calculations, 1 kilobyte does not contain 1000 bytes, but 2 10 - 1024 bytes.
How many in one gigabyte?
The prefix "gigabyte" on the SI system means 10 9 , that is, 1 billion. The closest prefix to gig is mega, which is 10 3 times smaller. But on the territory of most countries of the world, including Russia, the exact number of bytes is determined using a two to the nth degree, so the answer to the question of how many MB per 1 GB is 1024.
Continuing to consider smaller values, instead of multiplying by 1000, further calculations are performed using 2 to the 10th power. Thus, 1 GB is 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 kilobytes or 1024 3 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. To get the number of bits in 1 GB, you need to multiply the obtained byte value by 8, getting a total of just over a billion.
The largest value of memory
The line of measurements of memory units has long surpassed the prefix "gig" by several steps. At the moment, the largest value of the amount of information is one iottabyte. Compared to 1 GB, this is 10 15 times more or, according to the Russian definition, 20 50 times.
Between iottabyte and gigabyte there are 4 more definitions of volume, each of which reduces the degree of 10s by three when using the SI system or, in the binary case, the degree of two by 10.
Is a gigabyte a lot or a little?
Every day, various calculations are made in the world, for storing the total volume of which 1 GB is not enough. This value is hardly suitable even for the operation of one user - now the amount of RAM in which constantly used data is stored is already many times greater than this value. The size of one movie in average quality lasting about an hour takes a little more than a gigabyte, which is why the very value of the memory volume has become relatively small, despite the great importance when considering bytes.
1 GB flash drives are also remnants of the past that are already hard to find. Now they use more voluminous devices to transfer information, including external hard drives, the volume of which can reach a dozen terabytes, which is 1000 times more than a gigabyte.