Bits to Megabytes (bit to MB)
1 bit equals 1.25×10⁻⁷ megabytes exactly.
How to convert bits to megabytes
To convert bits to megabytes, multiply the number of bits by 1.25×10⁻⁷. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megabytes by 8,000,000.
megabytes = bits × 1.25×10⁻⁷
Example: 10 bits = 0.00000125 megabytes.
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
Bit (bit)
The smallest unit of digital information: a single 0 or 1. Eight bits make a byte.
Bit is short for binary digit, and the word was coined by John W. Tukey. He shortened the phrase in a Bell Labs memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon first used it in print in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication and credited Tukey with the word. The idea predates the name: Ralph Hartley proposed a logarithmic measure of information in 1928, and punched cards, invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon in 1732 and developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, already stored one bit per hole position.
A bit holds one of two values, written 0 or 1, and everything digital is built from them. Eight bits make a byte, so a bit is one eighth of a byte. Symbols for the unit are not settled: the IEC standard uses bit, while IEEE 1541-2002 recommends a lowercase b, with uppercase B reserved for the byte. The difference matters because internet speeds and file sizes are quoted in different units.
1 bit = 0.125 bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Bit; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
Megabyte (MB)
1,000,000 bytes (decimal). A typical MP3 song is 3–5 MB; a smartphone photo is 2–5 MB.
Megabyte started out as informal jargon. Base-1,024 usage grew because 1,024 is close to 1,000 and convenient for binary multiples. In 1999 the IEC standardized binary prefixes, assigning megabyte to 10 to the sixth bytes and mebibyte to 2 to the twentieth. By the end of 2009 the IEEE, the EU, ISO and NIST had adopted that standard, though the word still carries different meanings in practice.
The famous 1.44 MB floppy disk is a mixed case: it counts 1,024,000 bytes per megabyte, and it actually holds 1,474,560 bytes. Today most storage media and networking use the decimal definition, while Windows uses the binary one for memory such as RAM. For scale, a PlayStation 2 memory card held 8 MB, the plain text of Moby Dick runs to 1.192 MB, and one megabyte holds about one minute of 128 kbit/s MP3 audio.
1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Megabyte; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
Related conversions
- Megabytes to bits (reverse)
- Bits to bytes
- Bits to kilobytes
- Bits to gigabytes
- Bits to terabytes
- Bits to petabytes
- Bits to kibibytes
- Bits to mebibytes
- Bits to gibibytes
- Bits to tebibytes
- Bits to kilobits
- Bits to megabits
- Bits to gigabits
- Bytes to megabytes
- Kilobytes to megabytes
- Gigabytes to megabytes
- Terabytes to megabytes
- Petabytes to megabytes
- Kibibytes to megabytes
- Mebibytes to megabytes
- Gibibytes to megabytes
- Tebibytes to megabytes
- Kilobits to megabytes
- Megabits to megabytes
- Gigabits to megabytes
See all digital storage units.