Megabytes to Bytes (MB to B)

1 megabyte equals 1,000,000 bytes exactly.

1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes

How to convert megabytes to bytes

To convert megabytes to bytes, multiply the number of megabytes by 1,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bytes by 0.000001.

bytes = megabytes × 1,000,000

Example: 10 megabytes = 10,000,000 bytes.

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)

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

Byte (B)

ComputingCurrent unit

Eight bits. The basic addressable unit of memory and storage.

Werner Buchholz coined the word byte in June 1956 while working on the IBM Stretch computer; the earliest supporting document is dated 11 June 1956. He respelled bite on purpose, in his words to avoid accidental mutation to bit. At that stage a byte was any group of one to six bits, and a move to eight bits was considered in August 1956 and built into the design soon after. Louis Dooley later claimed he had coined the term around 1956 or 1957 on the SAGE project at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where it meant groups of four bits, but Fred Brooks credited Buchholz.

IBM's System/360 adopted the eight-bit byte, and its success made that size the standard. The symbol is a capital B, and the unambiguous alternative is octet, a word used in protocol standards such as RFC 791. A byte can hold 256 distinct values, enough for a letter of the alphabet in a simple character set, which is why files and memory addresses are counted in bytes.

The byte is the reference unit for digital storage on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Byte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.