Both Megabyte (MB) and Mebibyte (MiB) are units of information or computer storage. But MB is used in two ways either as equivalent to 1000 Kb or 1024 Kb. This creates some sort of confusion. To avoid this, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) (1998), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission. They recommended the use of Mebibyte (a combination of Mega and Binary) MiB, which always refer to 1024 Kb. See the table for percentage difference in storage size in MB and MiB. The difference is significant as the storage size increases.
Megabyte
A megabyte (MB) is a unit of measurement for digital storage capacity. It is commonly used to express the size of computer files, such as documents, images, and videos. One megabyte is equal to 1,000,000 bytes (1,048,576 bytes to be exact). This means that a file that is 1 megabyte in size would take up 1,000,000 bytes of storage space on a computer's hard drive or other storage device.
Mebibyte
A mebibyte (MiB) is a unit of measurement for digital storage capacity that is based on the binary system (base-2). It is commonly used to express the size of computer files, such as documents, images, and videos. One mebibyte is equal to 1,048,576 bytes (2^20 bytes). This means that a file that is 1 mebibyte in size would take up 1,048,576 bytes of storage space on a computer's hard drive or other storage device. The term mebibyte is often used in the context of computer science, engineering, and information technology, whereas megabyte is more commonly used in the context of consumer technology.
Key differences between Megabyte Vs Mebibyte
Megabyte :
- Megabyte is a multiple of 1000
- The unit symbol for the megabyte is MB
- Megabyte is estimated as 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes
- The decimal prefix Mega means 1000 x 1000 bytes=100000 bytes
- 1MB=1000*1000 bytes= 1000000 bytes or 1000kb
- Technically, Megabyte is a power of 10
- Sometimel MB refers to both 1000 Kb or 1024 Kb
- Disk manufactures commonly use decimal prefix or MB
- Storage devices such as HDDs and Flash drives, still uses MB (1000Kb) for calculating storage size
Mebibyte :
- Mebibyte is a multiple of 1024
- The unit symbol for the mebibyte is MiB
- Mebibyte is exactly 1,048,576 bytes.
- The binary prefix Mebi means 220 bytes=1024 x 1024 bytes=1048576 bytes
- 1 MiB=1024*1024 bytes= 1048576 bytes or 1048.576 Kb
- Mebibyte is always a power of 2
- 1 MiB is always 1024 Kb
- Memory manufactures commonly use binary prefix or MiB.
- Most operating systems Ubuntu and Windows use mebibytes to report file and storage sizes. For Example, 500 GB drive is reported by the OS as "465.66 GB" (meaning 465.66 GiB)