Megabyte Per Second (MB/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

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

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

1 megabyte per second = 8,000,000 bits per second

About the megabyte per second

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.

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

Megabyte Per Second conversion chart

1 megabyte per second expressed in every other data transfer rate unit:

Unit1 megabyte per second
Bps8,000,000
Kbps8,000
Mbps8
Gbps0.008
Tbps0.000008
B/s1,000,000
KB/s1,000
GB/s0.001
MiB/s0.9536743164
Kibit/s7,812.5
Mibit/s7.629394531
Gibit/s0.007450580597
KiB/s976.5625
GiB/s0.0009313225746

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