Bps to MB/s (bit/s to MB/s)

1 bit per second equals 1.25×10⁻⁷ megabytes per second exactly.

1 bit per second = 1.25×10⁻⁷ megabytes per second

How to convert bits per second to megabytes per second

To convert bits per second to megabytes per second, multiply the number of bits per second by 1.25×10⁻⁷. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megabytes per second by 8,000,000.

megabytes per second = bits per second × 1.25×10⁻⁷

Example: 10 bits per second = 0.00000125 megabytes per second.

Network speeds are quoted in bits per second (lowercase b), while file sizes use bytes (uppercase B). Divide Mbps by 8 for MB/s.

About these units

Bit Per Second (bit/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

The basic unit of data rate: one bit transferred each second.

Before there was a bit per second, there had to be a bit. The word is a contraction of binary digit, and John W. Tukey is credited with shortening it in a Bell Labs memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon then used it in print in his 1948 paper on the mathematical theory of communication, where he credited Tukey. Counting such bits against the clock gave engineers a way to compare telegraph lines, telephone circuits and computer links with one yardstick.

Today the bit per second is the base unit for data rates, written bit/s and often shortened to bps. It is not the same thing as the baud, which counts signalling events per second. The two agree only when each signal carries exactly one bit. Ten-megabit Ethernet over twisted pair, for instance, runs at 10 Mbit/s but sends about 20 million pulses per second because of its line coding. For scale, one cited figure puts the bare minimum for recognizable speech at around 800 bit/s, far below the 64 kbit/s of an ordinary digital phone line.

The bit per second is the reference unit for data transfer rate on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Bit (origin of the term); Wikipedia: Bit rate; Wikipedia: Baud

Megabyte Per Second (MB/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000,000 bytes per second (8 Mbps). Disk and download speeds are shown in MB/s.

Megabytes per second inherit all the confusion of the megabyte itself. The word has meant 1,000,000 bytes in networking, hard drives and DVDs, 1,048,576 bytes for memory under Microsoft Windows, and 1,024,000 bytes for the 3.5-inch floppy disk marketed as 1.44 MB, which actually held 1,474,560 bytes. In 1999 the IEC defined megabyte as 10⁶ bytes and mebibyte as 2²⁰ bytes, and by the end of 2009 the IEEE, EU, ISO and NIST had adopted that standard.

As a rate, 1 MB/s is 1,000,000 bytes per second, or 8 Mbit/s. File copies, game installers and disk benchmarks usually show MB/s, while internet plans use Mbit/s, so a 100 Mbit/s plan tops out near 12.5 MB/s. As a feel for size, about one minute of 128 kbit/s MP3 audio fits in roughly 1 MB, so a link carrying 1 MB/s moves about a minute of such audio every second.

1 megabyte per second = 8,000,000 bits per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Megabyte; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Data-rate units

Related conversions

See all data transfer rate units.