GB/s to Bps (GB/s to bit/s)

1 gigabyte per second equals 8,000,000,000 bits per second exactly.

1 gigabyte per second = 8,000,000,000 bits per second

How to convert gigabytes per second to bits per second

To convert gigabytes per second to bits per second, multiply the number of gigabytes per second by 8,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits per second by 1.25×10⁻¹⁰.

bits per second = gigabytes per second × 8,000,000,000

Example: 10 gigabytes per second = 80,000,000,000 bits per second.

Network speeds are quoted in bits per second (lowercase b), while file sizes use bytes (uppercase B). Divide Mbps by 8 for MB/s.

About these units

Gigabyte Per Second (GB/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000,000,000 bytes per second (8 Gbps). Memory and fast SSD bandwidth.

The gigabyte grew out of the same habit of rounding 1,024 to 1,000. In 1998 the IEC published binary prefixes, reserving gigabyte for the decimal value of 1,000,000,000 bytes and naming 1,073,741,824 bytes a gibibyte. Disk makers have used decimal capacities since the first disk drive, which is why a drive sold as 400 GB can appear as about 372 GB in Windows, while macOS, iOS and Android report decimal sizes.

A gigabyte per second is 1,000,000,000 bytes per second, equal to 8 Gbit/s. At that rate a 25 GB single-layer Blu-ray worth of data transfers in 25 seconds, and one hour of standard-definition video at 2.2 Mbit/s, about 1 GB, would pass in a single second. A 10 Gigabit Ethernet link, by comparison, tops out near 1.25 GB/s. Memory and storage interfaces tend to be described in this unit because their bandwidth is far beyond what ordinary networks offer.

1 gigabyte per second = 8,000,000,000 bits per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Gigabyte; Wikipedia: 10 Gigabit Ethernet; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples

Bit Per Second (bit/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

The basic unit of data rate: one bit transferred each second.

Before there was a bit per second, there had to be a bit. The word is a contraction of binary digit, and John W. Tukey is credited with shortening it in a Bell Labs memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon then used it in print in his 1948 paper on the mathematical theory of communication, where he credited Tukey. Counting such bits against the clock gave engineers a way to compare telegraph lines, telephone circuits and computer links with one yardstick.

Today the bit per second is the base unit for data rates, written bit/s and often shortened to bps. It is not the same thing as the baud, which counts signalling events per second. The two agree only when each signal carries exactly one bit. Ten-megabit Ethernet over twisted pair, for instance, runs at 10 Mbit/s but sends about 20 million pulses per second because of its line coding. For scale, one cited figure puts the bare minimum for recognizable speech at around 800 bit/s, far below the 64 kbit/s of an ordinary digital phone line.

The bit per second is the reference unit for data transfer rate on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Bit (origin of the term); Wikipedia: Bit rate; Wikipedia: Baud

Related conversions

See all data transfer rate units.