Megabyte

Full definition of megabyte

Noun

1. One million bytes. SI Symbol: MB
• 1964, IBM, System/360 System Summary, page 27The IBM 2301 Drum Storage (Figure 20) provides random access storage of approximately 4 million bytes at a data rate of 1.2 megabytes per second.
• 1973, IBM, Reference Manual for IBM 3340/3344 Disk Storage, page 3This 70-megabyte bytes data module contains fixed heads in addition to the normal access heads.
2. (computing) 1,048,576 bytes; a mebibyte. Frequently abbreviated MB.
• 2003, Michael Meyers, Managing and Troubleshooting PCs, page 933One megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. One megahertz, however is a million Hertz.
• 2004, Kerry Cox & Christopher Gerg, Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools, page 92Defaults to 2 megabytes (2,097,152 bytes).
• 2006, Eriq Oliver Neale, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed, page 290By default, each log file ... is exactly 5 megabytes (5,242,880 bytes) in size.

Related terms

• Previous: kilobyte
• Next: gigabyte
• MB
• Mb
• mebibyte
• megabit