What are megabytes?

Answer 1

The prefix mega- means "1 million", and a byte is usually made up of 8 bits, so:

• A megabit (Mbit) is
  • 1,000,000 bits
  • 1,000 kilobits (kbit)
• A megabyte (MB) is
  • 1,000,000 bytes (B)
  • 1,000 kilobytes (kB)
  • 8,000,000 bits
  • 8,000 kilobits (kbit)

In some contexts, people in the computing and information technology industry use the prefix mega differently. Because digital computing is based upon a binary numbering system, mega- in many cases meant 1,048,576, while in others it meant 1,000,000.

With the increase in use of, and access to, the technology by persons with little or no education in digital computing, or experience of this historical meaning, the prefixes mega- and kilo- etc. became confusing because of their ambiguous meanings.

With the increase in storage capacities, the discrepancy between the two measurement systems became much larger and more important, and the old meaning of mega in the binary numbering system is now, therefore, formally known as megabinary.

Answer 2

Megabyte translates to million bytes but the way computers keep track of things a megabyte as a unit of measure used for computer memory and storage is equal to 1,048,576 bytes. A byte being composed of 8 bits each of which denotes a single binary value.

For some reason, with flash memory drives such as USB sticks, SD cards, and the like, a megabyte is really 1 million bytes (1,000,000). After some legal activities, packaging for flash memory devices actually state that a megabyte means a million bytes (and a gigabyte means a billion bytes).

Answer 3

8 bits equals 1 byte

1 mega bits equals 1,000,000 bits or 125,000 bytes or 0.1192 megabyte