GiB/s to Bps (GiB/s to bit/s)

1 gibibyte per second equals 8,589,934,592 bits per second exactly.

1 gibibyte per second = 8,589,934,592 bits per second

How to convert gibibytes per second to bits per second

To convert gibibytes per second to bits per second, multiply the number of gibibytes per second by 8,589,934,592. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits per second by 1.164153218×10⁻¹⁰ (rounded).

bits per second = gibibytes per second × 8,589,934,592

Example: 10 gibibytes per second = 85,899,345,920 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

Gibibyte Per Second (GiB/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,073,741,824 bytes per second.

Gibibytes per second belong to the top of the speed range, where memory and fast storage move data in bulk. One gibibyte per second is 1,073,741,824 bytes per second. Multiplying by 8 gives 8,589,934,592 bits per second, so it is about 8.59 decimal gigabits per second and roughly 7.4 percent more than a decimal gigabyte per second.

The gi in the name stands for gigabinary, one of the contractions proposed in 1995 by an IUPAC committee. The IEC approved the finished prefixes in December 1998 as a way to separate binary multiples from SI ones. Later editions added further prefixes, and ISO/IEC 80000-13 now carries the binary prefix definitions. A gibibyte rate is easy to confuse with a gigabit rate, because the two differ by a factor of about 8.6, so conversions between them need care.

1 gibibyte per second = 8,589,934,592 bits per second (exactly).

Sources: NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; Wikipedia: Data-rate units

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.