Megabyte (MB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000,000 bytes (decimal). A typical MP3 song is 3–5 MB; a smartphone photo is 2–5 MB.

1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes (exactly).

1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes

About the megabyte

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.

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

Megabyte conversion chart

1 megabyte expressed in every other digital storage unit:

Unit1 megabyte
Bytes1,000,000
Kilobytes1,000
Gigabytes0.001
Terabytes0.000001
Bits8,000,000
Petabytes1×10⁻⁹
Kibibytes976.5625
Mebibytes0.9536743164
Gibibytes0.0009313225746
Tebibytes9.094947018×10⁻⁷
Kilobits8,000
Megabits8
Gigabits0.008
Exabytes1×10⁻¹²
Zettabytes1×10⁻¹⁵
Yottabytes1×10⁻¹⁸
Pebibytes8.881784197×10⁻¹⁰
Exbibytes8.67361738×10⁻¹³
Terabits0.000008
Kibibits7,812.5
Mebibits7.629394531
Gibibits0.007450580597
Nibbles2,000,000

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