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Mebibyte

Mebibyte

Mebibyte: a unit of data measurement equal to 1,048,576 bytes.

Mebibyte is the binary equivalent of the Megabyte, using the power of 2 instead of ten,2^20 to be specific.

Because of this it totals 1,048,576 bytes instead of the metric amount (1000000).

Instead of being defined by the SI system of measurement, it is set by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and is denoted by the symbol MiB.

Like the Megabyte, it is the third multiple in the series, but in this case it is a multiple of 1024 instead of 1000, making it about 4.8% larger than the Megabyte.

This means when looking at the basic formula for each- 1000 for Mega and 1024 for Mebi- the conversion can be seen as MiB= 1.048 MB. It comes after the Kibibyte, but before the Gibibyte.

One has to be careful when dealing with the metric and binary systems, because the two measurements are different amounts and therefore not interchangeable, meaning a mistake can have dangerous consequences in terms of what can be stored or in data calculation.

A simple way of looking at it is that the base for both is the bit, followed by the byte which is 8 times the size of the bit.

After that, each metric measurement is 1000 times the previous term, and each binary unit is 1024 times the size of the previous unit.

Note that the Mebibyte is on the binary scale, which is an IEC standard of measurement. Like other measuring units, it has an SI counterpart, which measures on the metric scale of powers of ten, instead of the binary scale using multiples of 2. This metric counterpart is the Megabyte.

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