Conversion from Gibibits to Octets

Information about the Gibibit (Gibit)

The gibibit is a unit of digital information equal to 1,073,741,824 bits, which is 1,024 mebibits or two to the thirtieth power. Its symbol is Gibit. It is the binary counterpart of the gigabit, and the two now differ by 7.4 per cent — a gap wide enough that mistaking one for the other in a purchase order is a genuine error.

Its practical home is the memory industry. Dynamic memory chips are made in binary capacities because their internal organisation is a rectangular grid of rows and columns, both addressed in binary. A part described as 8 gigabits in marketing material is an 8-gibibit die, holding 8,589,934,592 bits, and eight of those make the 8 gibioctets a memory module advertises as 8 GB.

Flash memory follows the same rule for the same reason, though with a twist: flash dies include spare blocks to replace cells that wear out, so the usable capacity of a drive is deliberately less than the raw capacity of its chips. Manufacturers then quote the usable figure in decimal units, which is how a drive built from binary parts ends up labelled with a decimal number.

The 7.4 per cent gap explains a great deal of everyday confusion. A memory module of 8 gibioctets and a solid-state drive of 8 gigaoctets are not the same size, though both are written 8 GB. The module holds 8.59 gigaoctets; the drive holds 8.00. Nothing is wrong with either figure, but they are counted in different bases and cannot be compared without conversion.

A gibibit is 134,217,728 octets, or 128 mebioctets. In everyday terms that is roughly a hundred and thirty megaoctets — a couple of dozen photographs, or two minutes of high-definition video. It is not a large amount of data by modern standards, which is why the unit appears in component specifications rather than in descriptions of files.

The correct symbol, Gibit, is used in datasheets and in standards but almost never in advertising. When a document writes Gb without further explanation, the safe assumption is that memory means the binary quantity and networking means the decimal one, and that a careful writer would have written Gibit or Gbit to say which.

One gibibit equals 1,073,741,824 bits, 1,024 mebibits, 134,217,728 octets, or about 1.074 gigabits.

Information about the Octet (octet)

The octet is a unit of digital information equal to exactly eight bits. Its symbol is octet, and its name comes from the Latin for a group of eight. It is the unit in which nearly all stored data is counted, and the reason it is called an octet rather than a byte is worth knowing.

A byte was originally the number of bits a machine used to hold one character, and that number was not fixed. Early computers used six-bit bytes, some used seven, and a few used nine. The IBM System/360 of 1964 settled on eight and its commercial success made eight the norm, but the word byte kept its older, machine-dependent meaning in specifications where ambiguity was dangerous.

The networking world therefore adopted octet. When a protocol standard says a header field is four octets long, no reader anywhere can interpret that as anything but thirty-two bits. The internet standards published by the IETF use octet throughout for exactly that reason, and French, Romanian and several other languages adopted the word for ordinary use as well, so that a hard disc sold in France is measured in gigaoctets.

Eight bits hold 256 distinct values, which is why so many things come in units of 256. A colour channel runs from 0 to 255. An IPv4 address is four octets, written as four numbers each between 0 and 255. The original ASCII character set used seven bits, leaving one spare, and the various eight-bit extensions that followed each filled that spare bit with a different set of accented letters — the mess that Unicode eventually replaced.

Modern text encoding still counts in octets. UTF-8 uses one octet for the unaccented Latin alphabet, two for most European accented letters and Greek and Cyrillic, three for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and four for the rest. That is why the same sentence occupies different amounts of storage in different languages, and why a text-length limit measured in octets is not a limit on characters.

Storage capacity, file sizes, memory and network payloads are all quoted in octets or their multiples. Transmission rates are the exception, being quoted in bits per second, and the factor of eight between the two conventions is the single most common source of confusion in the field.

One octet equals 8 bits, 0.008 kilobits, or 0.001 kilooctets.