| Gigabits (Gbit) | Pebioctets (Pio) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gigabit | 0.000000111022302463 Pio |
| 2 Gigabits | 0.000000222044604925 Pio |
| 3 Gigabits | 0.000000333066907388 Pio |
| 4 Gigabits | 0.00000044408920985 Pio |
| 5 Gigabits | 0.000000555111512313 Pio |
| 10 Gigabits | 0.00000111022302463 Pio |
| 20 Gigabits | 0.00000222044604925 Pio |
| 25 Gigabits | 0.00000277555756156 Pio |
| 50 Gigabits | 0.00000555111512313 Pio |
| 100 Gigabits | 0.0000111022302463 Pio |
| Reference | Gigabits (Gbit) | Pebioctets (Pio) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 0.00000128 Gbit | 1.42109 × 10-13 Pio |
| A three-minute MP3 | 0.024 Gbit | 0.00000000266454 Pio |
| A smartphone photo | 0.032 Gbit | 0.00000000355271 Pio |
| A high-definition film | 32 Gbit | 0.00000355271 Pio |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 400 Gbit | 0.0000444089 Pio |
The gigabit is a unit of digital information equal to one thousand million bits, or one billion in the short scale. Its symbol is Gbit. It is the unit that names the current standard of wired networking, and the word gigabit has become shorthand for a particular level of capability rather than merely a quantity.
Gigabit Ethernet, standardised in 1998 and 1999, carries one gigabit per second over ordinary twisted-pair copper cabling up to a hundred metres. It replaced the hundred-megabit standard that preceded it and remains the connection built into most computers, switches and routers. That single decision fixed the meaning of gigabit for a generation of engineers.
In octets, a gigabit is 125 megaoctets. A gigabit-per-second link therefore moves about 125 megaoctets each second in ideal conditions, so a two-gigaoctet film transfers in around sixteen seconds. Real transfers are slower because protocol overhead, disc speed and the far end of the connection all impose their own limits, and it is unusual for storage to keep up with the network at these rates.
Domestic fibre services now advertise gigabit speeds routinely, and in many countries the figure has become a marketing threshold rather than a technical one. Very few households can use it: a gigabit connection is enough to stream around two hundred high-definition video services at once. Its real benefit is not peak speed but headroom, since a link that is never near capacity has consistently low latency.
Memory chips are specified in gigabits for the same reason smaller ones are specified in megabits: the count reflects the number of storage cells on the die. An 8-gigabit chip holds one gigaoctet, and eight such chips make an 8-gigaoctet memory module. Flash memory follows the same convention, so a 512-gigabit flash die holds 64 gigaoctets.
Above the gigabit the scale continues in thousands. Ten-gigabit Ethernet is standard in data centres, forty and hundred-gigabit links join buildings and cities, and the backbone of the internet runs at multiples of these. Each step keeps the same relationship to the octet, and each step is quoted in bits per second because that is what the optics and the copper actually carry.
One gigabit equals 1,000,000,000 bits, 1,000 megabits, 125 megaoctets, or about 0.9313 gibibits.
The pebioctet is a unit of digital information equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624 octets, which is 1,024 tebioctets. Its symbol is Pio. It is the binary counterpart of the petaoctet, and the two now differ by 12.6 per cent.
This is the unit in which filesystem limits are written. Several widely deployed filesystems have maximum file or volume sizes that are exact powers of two, and those limits fall in this range: sixteen tebioctets for one, a pebioctet for another, eight pebioctets for a third. The numbers are not choices made by anyone; they follow from how many bits the filesystem uses to number its blocks.
Large scientific and commercial storage systems are also sized here. A research computing centre may run a filesystem of several pebioctets across thousands of drives, and the tools that manage it report in pebioctets because the underlying allocation is binary throughout. Converting those figures to decimal units for a report introduces an error of an eighth for no benefit.
A pebioctet is roughly a thousand large consumer hard drives, or the complete video output of a broadcaster over many years. It is also close to the size of the largest single scientific archives, though those are typically stated in petaoctets by press offices and in pebioctets by the engineers who run them, which produces two different numbers for the same building.
Distinguishing the two is not pedantry at this level. A twelve per cent difference on a purchase of many pebioctets is a large sum of money, and a capacity plan built on the wrong unit will be wrong by more than the margin most plans allow. This is precisely the situation the IEC prefixes were introduced to prevent.
The symbol Pio is used in filesystem documentation, in storage system manuals and in standards. Where a source writes PB without saying which it means, the difference is an eighth, and the honest thing for a reader to do is treat the figure as approximate rather than assume one convention or the other.
One pebioctet equals 1,024 tebioctets, 1,125,899,906,842,624 octets, 8 pebibits, or about 1.126 petaoctets.