Gibibytes to Megabytes (GiB to MB)

1 gibibyte equals 1,073.741824 megabytes exactly.

1 gibibyte = 1,073.741824 megabytes

How to convert gibibytes to megabytes

To convert gibibytes to megabytes, multiply the number of gibibytes by 1,073.741824. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megabytes by 0.0009313225746 (rounded).

megabytes = gibibytes × 1,073.741824

Example: 10 gibibytes = 10,737.41824 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

Gibibyte (GiB)

ComputingCurrent unit

Exactly 1,073,741,824 bytes (2³⁰), about 7.4% larger than a gigabyte. Windows displays this as 'GB', which is why a 500 GB drive appears as about 465 GB.

Gibibyte is the unit that explains why a new drive looks smaller than its box says. It is the IEC name, from December 1998, for 2 to the thirtieth bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes, chosen to denote powers of 1,024 unambiguously. A GiB is about 7.4 percent larger than a decimal gigabyte, so a drive advertised as 500 GB holds 500 billion bytes, which is about 465.7 GiB.

Windows reports that number with the label GB, so users see a shortfall. RAM is still counted in the binary sense, while hard drives, SSDs, flash media and optical discs are usually labeled in decimal units. Courts have held that the legal definition of GB is the decimal one. The symbol GiB is formed by adding an i to GB, and apart from KDE and Qt-based applications it is rarely used in practice.

1 gibibyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Gibibyte; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples

Megabyte (MB)

ComputingCurrent unit

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

See all digital storage units.