Nibbles to Gigabytes (nibble to GB)

1 nibble equals 5×10⁻¹⁰ gigabytes exactly.

1 nibble = 5×10⁻¹⁰ gigabytes

How to convert nibbles to gigabytes

To convert nibbles to gigabytes, multiply the number of nibbles by 5×10⁻¹⁰. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply gigabytes by 2,000,000,000.

gigabytes = nibbles × 5×10⁻¹⁰

Example: 10 nibbles = 5×10⁻⁹ gigabytes.

Decimal prefixes (kB, MB, GB) are powers of 1,000; binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB) are powers of 1,024. Storage makers use decimal; Windows reports binary but labels it GB.

About these units

Nibble (nibble)

ComputingTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Four bits, or half a byte. One hexadecimal digit.

Computing slang supplied this name: if a byte is a bite, half of one is a nibble. Wikipedia reports that David B. Benson, a professor at Washington State University, may have coined it as a joke in 1958, and that the spelling nybble, echoing byte, appeared in computing magazines in the early 1980s. Other names for the same thing include half-byte, tetrad, quadbit and semi-octet.

A nibble is four bits, enough to hold one of 16 values, which is exactly one hexadecimal digit. That is why a byte of eight bits is written as two hex digits. IBM mainframes used nibbles in packed decimal, storing one decimal digit per nibble with the last one reserved for the sign, and early four-bit microprocessors and calculators worked on nibble-sized words.

It is a binary count, not a decimal or SI unit. The figure used here is 0.5 byte, or 4 bits.

1 nibble = 0.5 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Nibble; Wikipedia: Byte

Gigabyte (GB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000,000,000 bytes (decimal). Storage manufacturers and phone makers use this definition.

The gigabyte is where the decimal-versus-binary dispute turned into lawsuits. Drive makers advertise capacity in decimal units, so a 500 GB drive holds 500 billion bytes, but Windows reports sizes in binary units and shows about 465.7 of what it labels GB for the same drive. Early challenges against Western Digital and Seagate were settled, with Western Digital adding disclaimers that usable capacity may differ from the advertised figure.

A 2019 lawsuit was decided in the manufacturers' favor, with the court relying on the decimal definition. For scale, one gigabyte holds roughly an hour of standard-definition video at 2.2 Mbit/s. A single-layer DVD+R holds about 4.7 GB and a single-layer Blu-ray about 25 GB. RAM is still often sized in binary gigabytes, which the IEC would call gibibytes.

1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Gigabyte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; Wikipedia: Gibibyte

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.