Megabytes to Bits (MB to bit)
1 megabyte equals 8,000,000 bits exactly.
How to convert megabytes to bits
To convert megabytes to bits, multiply the number of megabytes by 8,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits by 1.25×10⁻⁷.
bits = megabytes × 8,000,000
Example: 10 megabytes = 80,000,000 bits.
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
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
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
Related conversions
- Bits to megabytes (reverse)
- Megabytes to bytes
- Megabytes to kilobytes
- Megabytes to gigabytes
- Megabytes to terabytes
- Megabytes to petabytes
- Megabytes to kibibytes
- Megabytes to mebibytes
- Megabytes to gibibytes
- Megabytes to tebibytes
- Megabytes to kilobits
- Megabytes to megabits
- Megabytes to gigabits
- Bytes to bits
- Kilobytes to bits
- Gigabytes to bits
- Terabytes to bits
- Petabytes to bits
- Kibibytes to bits
- Mebibytes to bits
- Gibibytes to bits
- Tebibytes to bits
- Kilobits to bits
- Megabits to bits
- Gigabits to bits
See all digital storage units.