How Many Megabytes in A Gigabyte

How Many Megabytes in A Gigabyte?

Before introducing how many MB in GB, let’s explore what byte is first. What is byte? Byte is a unit of measurement used in computer information technology to measure storage capacity. In common, one byte equals eight bits (1byte=8 bits).

Megabyte

As for megabyte, it is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. As we can see, the unit prefix mega is a multiplier of 1,000,000 (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, megabyte is one million bytes of information. In other words, 1MB (the abbreviation MB stands for megabyte) is equal to 1,000,000 bytes.

But please pay attention that most standard bodies advocate a set of binary prefixes, hence the conversion is that 1MB is equal to 1,024,000 bytes.

Nowadays, the amount of information measured by megabyte is used to show the size of a typical MP3 file, the size of a JPEC image, and so on.

Nowadays, however, storage devices are typically larger and larger, and their capacity is always either gigabyte or terabyte.

Gigabyte

According to the definition of megabyte, we can infer the definition of gigabyte that it is also a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. A gigabyte, abbreviated to GB, has been a common unit of capacity measurement for data storage products.

Introduced in 1980, the 1^st gigabyte-capacity hard drive was the IBM 3380 which packaged two 1.26GB hard disk assemblies in a refrigerator-sized cabinet. The price of such hard drives ranged from $81,000 to $142,000, depending on the configuration.

GB is also used to show the size of memory, movie, computer RAM, and so on. The maximum amount of information stored in a single layer DVD is usually 4.8GB, and the maximum amount of information that can be stored in a single layer Blu-ray disc equals to 25GB.

There is the same situation that some people mix up gigabyte with megabit. A gigabyte refers to the data in motion. In other words, this term also means the data transfer rate rather than storage space.

Megabytes VS. Gigabytes

Let’s see the comparison between megabytes and gigabytes in some aspects.

MB to GB

According the definition of megabyte and gigabyte, can you infer how many megabytes in a gigabyte?

In fact, there are two conversion ways about MB to GB.

• 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1000 megabytes (decimal);
• 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1024 megabytes (binary).

In common, we adopt the second conversion about gigabytes to megabytes. There are 1,024 megabytes in a gigabyte.

In order to master the conversion about gigabytes to megabytes, you can look at the following table.

Megabytes to Gigabytes Conversion Table

There is also another unit of capacity measurement for data storage terabyte, which has become the more common unit of storage capacity measurement, especially for hard disk drives and solid-state drives.