| Gigaoctets per second (Go/s) | Yobibits per second (Yibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gigaoctet per second | 6.61744490042 × 10-15 Yibit/s |
| 2 Gigaoctets per second | 1.32348898008 × 10-14 Yibit/s |
| 3 Gigaoctets per second | 1.98523347013 × 10-14 Yibit/s |
| 4 Gigaoctets per second | 2.64697796017 × 10-14 Yibit/s |
| 5 Gigaoctets per second | 3.30872245021 × 10-14 Yibit/s |
| 10 Gigaoctets per second | 6.61744490042 × 10-14 Yibit/s |
| 20 Gigaoctets per second | 1.32348898008 × 10-13 Yibit/s |
| 25 Gigaoctets per second | 1.65436122511 × 10-13 Yibit/s |
| 50 Gigaoctets per second | 3.30872245021 × 10-13 Yibit/s |
| 100 Gigaoctets per second | 6.61744490042 × 10-13 Yibit/s |
| Reference | Gigaoctets per second (Go/s) | Yobibits per second (Yibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.000007 Go/s | 4.63221 × 10-20 Yibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0125 Go/s | 8.27181 × 10-17 Yibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.125 Go/s | 8.27181 × 10-16 Yibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.003125 Go/s | 2.06795 × 10-17 Yibit/s |
The gigaoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to one thousand million octets per second, or eight gigabits per second. Its symbol is Go/s. It is the unit of the fastest storage devices and of the buses inside a computer, where data moves between processor, memory and drive.
Solid-state drives on the current interface reach 3 to 14 gigaoctets per second, depending on the number of lanes they use and the generation of the bus. Each lane of the peripheral interconnect provides roughly 2 gigaoctets per second at the current generation, and a drive typically uses four of them. Doubling the generation doubles the rate, which is why the figures have risen so steadily.
Main memory is faster still. A modern memory channel delivers 30 to 60 gigaoctets per second, and a machine with several channels reaches hundreds. Graphics processors, which must feed thousands of arithmetic units at once, use memory with bandwidths measured in thousands of gigaoctets per second, at which point the unit gives way to teraoctets.
That hierarchy is what determines how a program performs. A processor can execute far more operations per second than memory can supply data for, so most fast software is written to keep data in the small fast caches rather than to fetch it repeatedly from main memory. The whole discipline of performance engineering rests on the size of these differences.
For everyday comparison, one gigaoctet per second copies a two-gigaoctet film in two seconds, and fills a one-teraoctet drive in about seventeen minutes. That is faster than the network in almost every home and faster than most external connections, so at this rate the bottleneck moves back to whatever is at the other end.
The unit also describes network links in the data centre. A ten-gigabit connection is 1.25 gigaoctets per second, a hundred-gigabit connection 12.5, and both are common between servers. Comparing a storage figure in octets with a network figure in bits requires the factor of eight, and forgetting it is how equipment gets mismatched.
One gigaoctet per second equals 1,000,000,000 octets per second, 8 gigabits per second, or about 0.9313 gibioctets per second.
The yobibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the eightieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 zebibits per second. Its symbol is Yibit/s. It is the largest binary transfer rate the International Electrotechnical Commission has named, and the binary counterpart of the yottabit per second.
At this final step the binary and decimal conventions differ by 20.9 per cent, and that number is the conclusion of the argument the IEC prefixes were created to settle. A naming habit that was 2.4 per cent wrong at the kibibit has grown, through eight successive multiplications by 1.024, into a discrepancy of more than a fifth. No measurement system can carry an ambiguity that large.
The unit describes nothing. Global internet traffic runs at roughly an exabit per second, so a yobibit per second is over a million times the total communication of the human species. No link, no aggregate and no forecast reaches it, and none is expected to.
The binary series stops here because the decimal series stopped at yotta when the IEC standard was written in 1998. When ronna and quetta were added to the metric system in 2022, no matching binary names were defined, so a rate of two to the ninetieth bits per second has no accepted short form. That gap will presumably be filled if it is ever needed, which at present it is not.
Defining a rung of a ladder nobody has climbed still has a purpose. A system whose names run out forces its users to improvise, and improvised extensions conflict; writing the whole series out in advance means the rule, rather than a table of exceptions, is all anyone has to learn. That is the same reasoning that gave the metric system its complete prefix set.
For any reader of technical material the lesson of the whole binary series is a single character. Kibit/s, Mibit/s, Gibit/s, Tibit/s, Pibit/s, Eibit/s, Zibit/s and Yibit/s are binary; kbit/s, Mbit/s, Gbit/s, Tbit/s, Pbit/s, Ebit/s, Zbit/s and Ybit/s are decimal; and the difference between them widens from a rounding error to a fifth as you climb.
One yobibit per second equals 1,024 zebibits per second, 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 octets per second, or about 1.209 yottabits per second.