But if you do any work with computers that does care you need to know about it. It’s all a bit confusing but fortunately they are generally close enough that it doesn’t cause major issues. So now sometimes when you see MB for Megabytes it means 1,000,000 bytes and sometimes it means 1,048,576 bytes. Kibi (from kilo and binary) = 1024 Mebi (from mega and binary) = 1,048,576 etc.Įxcept the standards groups that came up with and eventually agreed on these proposals couldn’t get everyone to use them. So they came up with separate binary prefixes to use. to have two possible values, one for bits/bytes and one for every other kind of unit. Since 1,000 * 1,000 = 1,000,000 they used 1024 * 1024 for Mega bits/bytes which is, you guessed it, 1,048,576.īut this bothered some people who didn’t like kilo/mega/giga etc. Programmers and other early computer users adopted the prefixes but used powers of 2 instead. ![]() The prefix kilo in the metric system means 1,000. ![]() Why? Because at the fundemental level that’s what computers use for counting because binary, the language of computers, is just 1’s and 0’s, meaning every bit can only have 2 values.ġ bit = 2 possible values (1 and 0). When working with computers programmers often use powers of 2. ![]() So a speed of 12 MB/s is the same as 96 Mb/s (or Mbps) well below 150+ Mbps speed. 1 byte (abbreviated B) = 8 bits (abbreviated b)
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