Mebibyte

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What Does Mebibyte Mean?

A mebibyte (MiB) is a multiple of the unit byte. It represents a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to 220,or 1,048,576, bytes.

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Techopedia Explains Mebibyte

Mebibyte was introduced to replace the use of megabyte in computer contextst, where it represents 220conflicting with the International System of Units (IS) definition of the term "mega." In other contexts, megabyte refers to 106 bytes.

Most operating systems use mebibytes to report file and storage sizes. Windows, for example, will report 220 bytes of file as 1 MB while reporting 106 as only 976 kB. The mebibyte prefix was created in December of 1998 by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to resolve the differences between these common usages.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.