Petabytes to Megabytes (PB to MB)
1 petabyte equals 1,000,000,000 megabytes exactly.
How to convert petabytes to megabytes
To convert petabytes to megabytes, multiply the number of petabytes by 1,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megabytes by 1×10⁻⁹.
megabytes = petabytes × 1,000,000,000
Example: 10 petabytes = 10,000,000,000 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
Petabyte (PB)
1,000 terabytes (10¹⁵ bytes). The scale of large data centers.
Peta entered the SI in 1975, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures approved peta and exa in its Resolution 10. A petabyte is 10 to the fifteenth bytes, or 1,000 terabytes, and the word is formed by attaching that prefix to byte, a term Werner Buchholz coined in June 1956 as a deliberate respelling of bite. The binary counterpart is the pebibyte: the IEC amendment published in January 1999 added pebi and exbi to the earlier binary names.
Decimal units dominate at this size: hard drives, SSDs, optical discs and network contracts all use powers of 1,000, and macOS, iOS, Android and Ubuntu follow suit. As an example of the size, one petabyte is about 2,000 years of MP3-encoded music at roughly one megabyte per minute. Binary use of the P symbol is less common than for smaller prefixes.
1 petabyte = 1×10¹⁵ bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Petabyte; BIPM: SI prefixes; Wikipedia: Binary prefix
Megabyte (MB)
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
- Megabytes to petabytes (reverse)
- Petabytes to bytes
- Petabytes to kilobytes
- Petabytes to gigabytes
- Petabytes to terabytes
- Petabytes to bits
- Petabytes to kibibytes
- Petabytes to mebibytes
- Petabytes to gibibytes
- Petabytes to tebibytes
- Petabytes to kilobits
- Petabytes to megabits
- Petabytes to gigabits
- Bytes to megabytes
- Kilobytes to megabytes
- Gigabytes to megabytes
- Terabytes to megabytes
- Bits to megabytes
- Kibibytes to megabytes
- Mebibytes to megabytes
- Gibibytes to megabytes
- Tebibytes to megabytes
- Kilobits to megabytes
- Megabits to megabytes
- Gigabits to megabytes
See all digital storage units.