The fact that megabytes (MB) and megabits (Mb) are different can be confusing sometimes. To understand the difference, it's a good idea to start by explaining the term "bit".
A bit is a very small unit of digital data. When eight bits come together, a byte is formed. 1 megabit contains 1 million bits. To reach 1 megabyte you need 8 megabits.
The units used when measuring the size of hard disks, data and files are often "bytes". When measuring internet data transfer rate, "bit" is usually used. Because data sizes are large these days, you'll come across the terms gigabyte (GB) or terabyte (TB) more often than bytes. 1GB represents 1024MB of data while 1TB represents 1024GB of data.
So there are more than enough bytes in a terabyte.
Because a megabit is smaller than a megabyte, it uses a lowercase "b" in its abbreviation. Its abbreviation is "Mb". The larger megabyte uses the capital letter "B" and is abbreviated as "MB".
Although Mb is frequently used when describing internet data speeds, we see that both are used when it comes to data transfer speed in general. When it comes to internet speed, the abbreviation is often accompanied by the suffix "ps", which means "every second". Thus, the abbreviations "Mbps" or "MBps" appear instead of Mb.
Why It's Important to Know the Difference
Internet service providers almost always use "Mb", that is, megabit. 100Mbps may seem like an incredible speed for an internet connection at first glance, but it doesn't mean you can transfer 100 megabytes per second. Here we are talking about a data transfer of 100 megabits per second, that is, a maximum of 12.5MB per second.
Obviously, this is a marketing ploy, because the bigger the numbers, the more likely it is to attract attention. Sometimes the words "up to" are added to these numbers (up to 50Mbps, for example) - in which case you may not always reach the stated speed, especially during peak hours.
How to Calculate Megabits and Megabytes?
Just remember that there are 8 megabits (Mb) in a megabyte (MB). To convert megabits to megabytes, you have to divide it by eight. Note that if you're not good with math, you can use Google or Chrome's search bar for conversions. For example, you can convert 8 megabits to megabytes by typing "8Mb to MB".
Why 1,024 and not 1,000?
Although this is not the subject of our article, we wanted to briefly explain this issue. For example, 1 kilobyte for a long time is 1024 bytes, but hard disk manufacturers have been using 1000 instead of 1024 for a long time. For example, when a hard drive manufacturer says 1TB, they are talking about 1000GB of space, not 1024GB.
This is one of the reasons why the 1TB hard drive you just bought shows around 930GB in Windows.
However, we see that in computer RAMs, RAM is calculated with binary numbers. So 8GB of RAM would equate to 8192MB.