text: what is a giga bite or gb?   2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. one gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. gigabyte is often abbreviated as g or gb  in december 1998 the international electrotechnical commission (iec), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an iec international standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission. the prefixes are as follows:    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- prefixes for binary multiples  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------    factor  name  symbol  origin derivation    210 kibi ki kilobinary: (210)1 kilo: (103)1   220 mebi mi megabinary: (210)2  mega: (103)2   230 gibi gi gigabinary: (210)3 giga: (103)3   240 tebi ti terabinary: (210)4 tera: (103)4   250 pebi pi petabinary: (210)5 peta: (103)5   260 exbi ei exabinary: (210)6 exa: (103)6     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------   examples and comparisons with si prefixes  one kibibit  1 kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit  one kilobit  1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit  one mebibyte  1 mib = 220 b = 1 048 576 b  one megabyte  1 mb = 106 b = 1 000 000 b  one gibibyte  1 gib = 230 b = 1 073 741 824 b  one gigabyte  1 gb = 109 b = 1 000 000 000 b   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------