Megabytes to Yottabytes (MB to YB)

1 megabyte equals 1×10⁻¹⁸ yottabytes exactly.

1 megabyte = 1×10⁻¹⁸ yottabytes

How to convert megabytes to yottabytes

To convert megabytes to yottabytes, multiply the number of megabytes by 1×10⁻¹⁸. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply yottabytes by 1×10¹⁸.

yottabytes = megabytes × 1×10⁻¹⁸

Example: 10 megabytes = 1×10⁻¹⁷ yottabytes.

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

Yottabyte (YB)

ComputingCurrent unit

10²⁴ bytes. Yotta was the largest SI prefix until ronna and quetta were added in 2022.

Yotta stands for the eighth power of 1,000 and was adopted in 1991, so a yottabyte is 10^24 bytes, or 1,000 zettabytes. It stood at the top of the SI prefix list until 2022, when the BIPM added ronna (10^27) and quetta (10^30), and the byte forms, ronnabyte and quettabyte, followed. The symbol is YB.

No storage system or traffic measure approaches this size. Global IP traffic in 2016 was only around 1.2 zettabytes a year, about one-thousandth of a yottabyte, so the unit has mostly served in forecasts and illustrations rather than measurement.

The binary yobibyte (YiB) is 2^80 bytes, which is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes and about 20.9 percent more than a yottabyte. IEC standards define byte multiples up to this level, and a gap that wide is why the decimal and binary names are worth keeping apart.

1 yottabyte = 1×10²⁴ bytes (exactly).

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

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.