Gigabits to Megabytes (Gb to MB)

1 gigabit equals 125 megabytes exactly.

1 gigabit = 125 megabytes

How to convert gigabits to megabytes

To convert gigabits to megabytes, multiply the number of gigabits by 125. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megabytes by 0.008.

megabytes = gigabits × 125

Example: 10 gigabits = 1,250 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

Gigabit (Gb)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000,000,000 bits (125 MB).

Gigabit is one billion bits, or 125 million bytes. In the IEC notation it is written Gbit, while IEEE 1541-2002 recommends Gb, which may be confused with GB for gigabyte. The binary counterpart, the gibibit, is 2 to the thirtieth bits. Network links and fiber are usually rated in gigabits per second, because data transfer rates are measured in decimal SI multiples.

Memory is where gigabits and binary habits collide. Chip capacity is often given in binary multiples using the ambiguous G prefix rather than the IEC Gi, so a DRAM chip advertised as 1 GB has 2 to the thirtieth bytes. The Wikipedia article on the bit says this was still causing difficulty for software designers as of 2022. When you see a gigabit rate, divide by eight for gigabytes per second.

1 gigabit = 125,000,000 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Gigabit; Wikipedia: Bit

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.