Megabytes to Exabytes (MB to EB)

1 megabyte equals 1×10⁻¹² exabytes exactly.

1 megabyte = 1×10⁻¹² exabytes

How to convert megabytes to exabytes

To convert megabytes to exabytes, multiply the number of megabytes by 1×10⁻¹². This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply exabytes by 1,000,000,000,000.

exabytes = megabytes × 1×10⁻¹²

Example: 10 megabytes = 1×10⁻¹¹ exabytes.

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

Exabyte (EB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000 petabytes (10¹⁸ bytes). Used for global internet traffic and very large data centers.

Exa comes from the SI prefix for the sixth power of 1,000, which the metric system adopted in 1975, so one exabyte is the decimal quantity 10^18 bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That is 1,000 petabytes, and it equals 8 x 10^18 bits. The symbol is EB, and it should not be confused with the binary exbibyte.

The exbibyte (EiB) is 2^60 bytes, which is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, about 15.3 percent more than an exabyte. Hard drive makers and networking use decimal definitions, so an exabyte is the usual unit for fleet-scale storage and traffic. Wikipedia illustrates the size as roughly global monthly internet traffic in 2004. By 2016 Cisco estimated global IP traffic at about 96 exabytes per month, roughly 1.2 zettabytes per year.

A 64-bit address space spans 2^64 bytes, which is 16 exbibytes, a binary quantity that is a different size from 16 exabytes.

1 exabyte = 1×10¹⁸ bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Byte; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; Wikipedia: Zettabyte Era

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.