The unit of measure for cloud computing storage.

If you have ever read the docs for a cloud service provider or clicked around on a IaaS dashboard, you may have seen the term ‘gibibyte’ or it’s acronym, GiB, and wondered if it was a typo. Well, it wasn’t a typo, you read it correctly, it said gibibyte.

So, what exactly is a gibibyte? It’s pretty simple really, it just means a full gigabyte of cloud storage space.

Wait, doesn’t that mean that a gibibyte is the same thing as a gigabyte? Not exactly.

Here’s an example…when you have a storage device, like a computer hard drive or a usb memory stick, it has a capacity in gigabytes. However, the storage drive always needs a small amount of space for it’s own disk utilities and configuration files, so you can never use that full storage capacity. Thus, a 32 GB usb thumb drive doesn’t actually allow you to store a full 32 GB of your own data. However, with cloud computing, the disk utilities and configurations are handled by a shared service. Each cloud storage container doesn’t need it’s own utilities so you are actually getting just a little bit more storage space. A 32 GiB cloud storage container will let you store a full 32 GB of your own data, while a 32 GB thumb drive will only let you store about 31.99 GB.