Mebibyte

The mebibyte (symbol: MiB) is a unit of information or computer data storage capacity:

1 MiB = 220 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes = 1,024 kibibytes

The mebibyte is closely related to the megabyte (MB). The megabyte refers to 106 bytes = 1 000 000 bytes (see binary prefix for background). The two units are relatively close together, but mistaking the two has nevertheless led to problems.

The unit MiB was defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in December 1998. Use of mebibyte and related units is strongly endorsed by IEEE and CIPM and is becoming more common in the measurement of information storage devices or services.

One mebibyte equals 1024 (= 210) kibibytes, and 1024 mebibytes equal one gibibyte.

Note on memory measuring

While on storage MB effectively differs from MiB; using base 10 in memory is considered an error prone practice, and it's normally troublesome due to convention taken in the information technology market.

Generally MiB and MB are considered equal when measuring all volatile memory (RAM, Cache, vRAM, etc...)

Other websites

  1. ↑ "Hard disk drive", Wikipedia, 2026-07-20, retrieved 2026-07-22
  2. ↑ Tanenbaum, Andrew S. "Structured Computer Organization" (PDF).
  3. ↑ "Transistor count", Wikipedia, 2026-07-11, retrieved 2026-07-22