from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- One billion (109): gigahertz.
- 1,073,741,824 (230): gigabyte.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- In the International System of Units and other metric systems of units, multiplying the unit to which it is attached by 109. Symbol: G
- Multiplying the unit to which it is attached by 230 or 1,073,741,824
Connolly wrote to the collaboration members that the database at the Space Telescope Science Institute was only 100 gigabytes—“giga-” means “billion”—and a search took five hours.
Kilo-, mega-, giga- and tera- are prefixes used with bit or byte to measure capacities.