Nibbles to Megabytes (nibble to MB)

1 nibble equals 5×10⁻⁷ megabytes exactly.

1 nibble = 5×10⁻⁷ megabytes

How to convert nibbles to megabytes

To convert nibbles to megabytes, multiply the number of nibbles by 5×10⁻⁷. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megabytes by 2,000,000.

megabytes = nibbles × 5×10⁻⁷

Example: 10 nibbles = 0.000005 megabytes.

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

Nibble (nibble)

ComputingTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Four bits, or half a byte. One hexadecimal digit.

Computing slang supplied this name: if a byte is a bite, half of one is a nibble. Wikipedia reports that David B. Benson, a professor at Washington State University, may have coined it as a joke in 1958, and that the spelling nybble, echoing byte, appeared in computing magazines in the early 1980s. Other names for the same thing include half-byte, tetrad, quadbit and semi-octet.

A nibble is four bits, enough to hold one of 16 values, which is exactly one hexadecimal digit. That is why a byte of eight bits is written as two hex digits. IBM mainframes used nibbles in packed decimal, storing one decimal digit per nibble with the last one reserved for the sign, and early four-bit microprocessors and calculators worked on nibble-sized words.

It is a binary count, not a decimal or SI unit. The figure used here is 0.5 byte, or 4 bits.

1 nibble = 0.5 bytes (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Nibble; Wikipedia: Byte

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

Related conversions

See all digital storage units.