Megabytes to Exbibytes (MB to EiB)

1 megabyte equals 8.67361738×10⁻¹³ exbibytes (rounded).

How to convert megabytes to exbibytes

To convert megabytes to exbibytes, multiply the number of megabytes by 8.67361738×10⁻¹³. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply exbibytes by 1,152,921,504,607 (rounded).

exbibytes = megabytes × 8.67361738×10⁻¹³

Example: 10 megabytes = 8.67361738×10⁻¹² exbibytes.

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

Exbibyte (EiB)

ComputingCurrent unit

Exactly 2⁶⁰ bytes (about 1.153 exabytes).

Exbi joins the first two letters of exa to bi, for binary, and was published by the IEC in January 1999 with pebi. An exbibyte (EiB) is exactly 2^60 bytes, which is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, or 1,024 pebibytes. NIST's page on binary prefixes lists it as the largest of the six original binary multiples.

The decimal exabyte is 10^18 bytes, so the exbibyte is about 15.3 percent larger. A useful landmark is the address space of a 64-bit machine, which can in principle reach 2^64 distinct byte addresses, or 16 exbibytes, a figure that has no neat decimal equivalent.

Real systems seldom approach this size, so the unit appears mostly in discussions of addressing and capacity limits. Like the other IEC names, it states plainly that the count is binary.

1 exbibyte = 1.152921505×10¹⁸ bytes (approximately).

Sources: NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; Wikipedia: Byte

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.