David W. answered 12/15/15
Experienced Prof
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 1,073,741,824 (10243 or 230) bytes, particularly for sizes of RAM. The use of gigabyte is thus ambiguous. For semiconductor RAM, the gigabyte denotes 1,073,741,824 bytes. For hard drive capacities as described and marketed by the drive manufacturers, the gigabyte denotes 1,000,000,000 bytes, but when a 500-GB drive's capacity is displayed by, for example, Microsoft Windows, it is reported as 465 GB, where GB then means 1,073,741,824 bytes.
To address this ambiguity, the binary prefixes are standardized in the International System of Quantities, each binary prefix denoting an integer power of 1024. With these prefixes, a memory module that is labeled as having the size 1 GB is designated as 1 GiB (one gibibyte).