Megabyte
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Overview
A Megabyte (meg, MB, Mbyte) is a measurement of storage on a Device or Drive. Electronic storage is measured in gigabytes, megabytes, gigabits etc. However many console makers cover this up by using a simple user friendly name like "Block".
So for example the Sony PlayStation memory card was split into 15 blocks, this meant that each block was around 68.2KB (all 15 blocks (68.2KB) adding up to 1MB (or 1024KB)). So any save game file which was 68.2KB or smaller would take 1 Block. If however the save game was bigger than 68.2KB but smaller than 136.4KB then it would take two blocks on the memory card. The disadvantage to this is that even though a save game file may be much smaller than 68.2KB it will still take up the whole of the block and the extra spae is wasted.
For Example:
Save game file is 12KB and therefore takes up one block; 68.2KB - 12KB = 56.2KB wasted.
How big is a Megabyte?
- 1 Gigabyte contains 1024 Megabytes
- 1 Megabyte contains 1024 Kilobytes
- 1 Kilobyte contains 1024 Bytes
The Microsoft Xbox & the Sony PlayStation 2 official memory card where both 8MB in size. GameCube's memory card was 1MB in size (it is advertised as 8Mb, which is 8 megabit not 8 megabyte, see The MB Confusion below)
A Standard PS2/Xbox DVD-ROM is 4,812.8 megabytes in size (4.7 gigabytes)
Useful Information
The MB and Mb Confusion
Some people often get confused about Bits and Bytes as they are displayed in a similar way. 10MB could be either 10 Megabytes or 10 Megabits. One of the most common confusion between the two is Internet speeds.
For example your average Broadband speed is 512Kbs, most people think this means 512kilobytes per second and are then confused when they see download speeds of only 60-70KBs. The reason for this is that in fact 512Kbs is actually 512 Kilobits per second and the download speed is displayed in Kilobytes per second.
- 512 Kilobits = 68 Kilobytes
The same applies to Megabytes and Megabits; there are 8 megabits in 1 megabyte.
A way to try and spot the difference is to check if the "b" is a capitol or not. Mb is Megabit, and MB is megabyte.
How to convert
If you ever need to convert one format into another you can use Google's excellent convert. Goto google.com and instead of entering a search term, instead enter this formula
- [amount] [type] in [type]
So an example would be:
- 100 megabyte in bytes
Then hit enter/search, instead of searching it will convert it for you as long as you used the correct formats.
See also
External Links
This article uses source material obtained from Wikipedia The original article can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte
