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Megabyte

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix mega is a multiplier of 1000000 (106) in the International System of Units (SI).[1] Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities.

This article is about the decimal unit of data. For binary unit of 10242 bytes, see mebibyte. For other uses, see Megabyte (disambiguation).

In the computer and information technology fields, other definitions have been used that arose for historical reasons of convenience. A common usage has been to designate one megabyte as 1048576bytes (220 B), a quantity that conveniently expresses the binary architecture of digital computer memory. The standards bodies have deprecated this usage of the megabyte in favor of a new set of binary prefixes,[2] in which this quantity is designated by the unit mebibyte (MiB).

a 1  bitmap image (e.g. ~1152 × 864) with 256 colors (8 bits/pixel color depth) stored without any compression.

megapixel

6 seconds of uncompressed CD audio.

44.1 kHz/16 bit

1 minute of 128  MP3 lossy compressed audio.

kbit/s

a typical English book volume in plain text format (500 pages × 2000 characters per page).

Depending on compression methods and file format, a megabyte of data can roughly be:


The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, hosted on Project Gutenberg as an uncompressed plain text file, is 0.429 MB. Great Expectations is 0.994 MB,[6] and Moby Dick is 1.192 MB.[7] The human genome consists of DNA representing 800 MB of data. The parts that differentiate one person from another can be compressed to 4 MB.[8]

Timeline of binary prefixes

Gigabyte § Consumer confusion

Historical Notes About The Cost Of Hard Drive Storage Space

(established definition in Networking and Storage industries; from whatis.com)

the megabyte

International Electrotechnical Commission definitions

Archived 2004-06-15 at the Wayback Machine

IEC prefixes and symbols for binary multiples

to How Many MB in a GB

Added Archived