Megabyte

Megabyte

Megabyte: a unit of data measurement equal to 1,000,000 bytes.

Megabyte is the metric equivalent of the Mebibyte, using the power of ten instead of two,〖10〗^9 to be specific. Because of this it totals 1,000,000 bytes instead of the metric amount.

It is defined by the metric SI standards of measurement instead of the binary IEC measurement standards. Like the Mebibyte, it is the third multiple in the series, but in this case it is a multiple of 1000 instead of 1024, making it about 4.8% smaller than the Mebibyte.

This means when looking at the basic formula for each- 1000 for Mega and 1024 for Mebi- the conversion can be seen as MiB= 1.048 KB.

It comes after the Kilobyte, but before the Gigabyte. MB are more often seen in multimedia, as these types of files require more space to be saved- JPEGS, MP3s, WAVs are all examples of multimedia files requiring more disk space.


A simple way of looking at it is that the base for both is the bit, followed by the byte which is 8 times the size of the bit.

After that, each metric measurement is 1000 times the previous term, and each binary unit is 1024 times the size of the previous unit.

Note that the Megabyte is on the metric scale, which is an SI standard of measurement. Like other measuring units, it has a binary counterpart, which measures on the binary scale of powers of two, instead of the metric scale using multiples of ten. This binary counterpart is the Mebibyte.

Read more