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 in the International System of Units. Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities.
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 , a quantity that conveniently expresses the binary architecture of digital computer memory. Standards bodies have deprecated this binary usage of the mega- prefix in favor of a new set of binary prefixes, by means of which the quantity 2²⁰ B is named mebibyte.

Definitions

The unit megabyte is commonly used for 1000² bytes or 1024² bytes. The interpretation of using base 1024 originated as technical jargon for the byte multiples that needed to be expressed by the powers of 2 but lacked a convenient name. As 1024 approximates 1000, roughly corresponding to the SI prefix kilo-, it was a convenient term to denote the binary multiple. In 1999, the International Electrotechnical Commission published standards for binary prefixes requiring the use of megabyte to denote 1000² bytes, and mebibyte to denote 1024² bytes. By the end of 2009, the IEC Standard had been adopted by the IEEE, EU, ISO and NIST. Nevertheless, the term megabyte continues to be widely used with different meanings.

Base 10

In this convention, one thousand megabytes is equal to one gigabyte, where 1 GB is one billion bytes.

Base 2

Mixed

Randomly addressable semiconductor memory doubles in size for each address lane added to an integrated circuit package, which favors counts that are powers of two. The capacity of a disk drive is the product of the sector size, number of sectors per track, number of tracks per side, and the number of disk platters in the drive. Changes in any of these factors would not usually double the size.

Examples of use

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

a 1megapixel bitmap image with 256 colors stored without any compression.
6seconds of 44.1 kHz/16 bit uncompressed CD audio.
1minute of 128kbit/s MP3 lossy compressed audio.

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, and Moby Dick is 1.192 MB.
The human genome consists of DNA representing 800MB of data. The parts that differentiate one person from another can be compressed to 4MB.