| Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gibioctet per second | 7.27595761418 × 10-12 Zibit/s |
| 2 Gibioctets per second | 1.45519152284 × 10-11 Zibit/s |
| 3 Gibioctets per second | 2.18278728426 × 10-11 Zibit/s |
| 4 Gibioctets per second | 2.91038304567 × 10-11 Zibit/s |
| 5 Gibioctets per second | 3.63797880709 × 10-11 Zibit/s |
| 10 Gibioctets per second | 7.27595761418 × 10-11 Zibit/s |
| 20 Gibioctets per second | 1.45519152284 × 10-10 Zibit/s |
| 25 Gibioctets per second | 1.81898940355 × 10-10 Zibit/s |
| 50 Gibioctets per second | 3.63797880709 × 10-10 Zibit/s |
| 100 Gibioctets per second | 7.27595761418 × 10-10 Zibit/s |
| Reference | Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.00000651926 Gio/s | 4.74338 × 10-17 Zibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0116415 Gio/s | 8.47033 × 10-14 Zibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.116415 Gio/s | 8.47033 × 10-13 Zibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.00291038 Gio/s | 2.11758 × 10-14 Zibit/s |
The gibioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,073,741,824 octets per second, which is 1,024 mebioctets per second. Its symbol is Gio/s. It is the unit of memory bandwidth and of the fastest storage interfaces, and the binary counterpart of the gigaoctet per second, from which it differs by 7.4 per cent.
Memory is where the unit belongs most naturally. A memory channel transfers a fixed number of octets per clock cycle, and that number is a power of two, so the resulting bandwidth is a binary multiple of the clock frequency. A machine with several channels reaches tens of gibioctets per second, and an accelerator with stacked memory reaches thousands.
Storage has caught up. A fast solid-state drive on the current interface sustains several gibioctets per second, which means that for the first time the drive and the memory are within an order of magnitude of each other. That convergence has changed how software is written: the old assumption that reading from disc is thousands of times slower than reading from memory no longer holds.
The unit appears in benchmark output, in system monitoring displays and in the specifications of processor interconnects. All of these count in binary because the structures they measure are binary, and reporting the result with a decimal prefix would introduce a seven per cent error for the sake of a familiar-looking label.
For a sense of what the rate means, one gibioctet per second copies a two-gigaoctet film in under two seconds and fills a one-teraoctet drive in about a quarter of an hour. Anything at this speed is faster than every external connection in an ordinary building, so the limiting factor moves inside the machine.
The distinction from the decimal unit matters most in procurement and capacity planning. A specification that requires 10 gigaoctets per second and a system that delivers 10 gibioctets per second are not the same, and the difference of 7.4 per cent is the sort of margin that decides whether a design meets its requirement.
One gibioctet per second equals 1,073,741,824 octets per second, 1,024 mebioctets per second, or about 1.074 gigaoctets per second.
The zebibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the seventieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 exbibits per second. Its symbol is Zibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the zettabit per second, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent — approaching a fifth.
Nothing runs at this rate, and nothing is designed to. A zebibit per second is about a thousand times the total instantaneous traffic of the internet, and it would move the world's entire stock of stored data in a matter of minutes. The unit exists because the IEC series, like the metric series it parallels, was defined completely rather than only as far as anyone then needed.
That completeness is a deliberate design principle rather than an oversight. A measurement system whose names run out at some arbitrary point forces every future user to improvise an extension, and improvised extensions conflict with one another. Defining the whole ladder in advance costs nothing and removes the possibility.
The eighteen per cent gap at this level is the clearest illustration of why the binary series was needed at all. At the kibibit the two conventions differed by 2.4 per cent, which nobody noticed; the discrepancy multiplies by 1.024 at each step, and by here it is large enough that no reader could treat the two labels as interchangeable even in casual writing.
In octets a zebibit per second is 147,573,952,589,676,412,928, or 128 exbioctets per second. Expressing the same rate in every unit on the scale is an exercise rather than an application, but it is one a converter has to perform correctly, because the arithmetic does not become approximate when the quantity becomes unreachable.
The practical lesson is the one the whole binary series teaches: the lowercase i is not optional. It is the only mark in a written figure that distinguishes a power of two from a power of ten, and by this point in the scale the two are nearly a fifth apart.
One zebibit per second equals 1,024 exbibits per second, 147,573,952,589,676,412,928 octets per second, or about 1.181 zettabits per second.