Megabytes to Pebibytes (MB to PiB)

1 megabyte equals 8.881784197×10⁻¹⁰ pebibytes (rounded).

How to convert megabytes to pebibytes

To convert megabytes to pebibytes, multiply the number of megabytes by 8.881784197×10⁻¹⁰. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply pebibytes by 1,125,899,907 (rounded).

pebibytes = megabytes × 8.881784197×10⁻¹⁰

Example: 10 megabytes = 8.881784197×10⁻⁹ pebibytes.

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

Pebibyte (PiB)

ComputingCurrent unit

Exactly 2⁵⁰ bytes (about 1.126 petabytes).

Pebi was one of the two prefixes, with exbi, that the IEC added in January 1999 as Amendment 2 to IEC 60027-2, extending the set it approved in December 1998. The name keeps the first two letters of peta and appends bi for binary, and the symbol is PiB. It is a binary unit of exactly 2^50 bytes, or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes.

That is 1,024 tebibytes. Set against the decimal petabyte of 10^15 bytes, a pebibyte is about 12.6 percent larger, a gap that has grown with each prefix step from 2.4 percent at kilo. As a result, anyone who divides a 1 PB figure from a storage vendor by 2^50 will see about 0.89 PiB.

The pebibyte is useful where capacity is counted in powers of two and the exact size must be unambiguous. Wikipedia illustrates the petabyte scale as about 2,000 years of music in MP3 form.

1 pebibyte = 1.125899907×10¹⁵ bytes (approximately).

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

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.