mebibyteistä

Mebibyte is a unit of digital information storage. It is one of the binary prefixes, part of the International System of Quantities (ISQ). The prefix mebi- signifies a factor of 2^20, which is equal to 1,048,576. Therefore, one mebibyte (MiB) is equal to 1,048,576 bytes. This is distinct from the megabyte (MB), which typically refers to 10^6 bytes, or 1,000,000 bytes.

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) introduced the mebibyte and other binary prefixes to eliminate ambiguity in computer science, where powers of two are commonly used. While megabytes are often used in marketing by storage manufacturers and in some contexts, mebibytes are more precise for certain technical applications, particularly in operating systems and memory specifications where binary calculations are fundamental.

The hierarchy of binary prefixes continues with gibibyte (GiB), tebibyte (TiB), and so on. A gibibyte is 1024 mebibytes, and a tebibyte is 1024 gibibytes. The distinction between decimal prefixes (like mega) and binary prefixes (like mebi) is important for accurately understanding data storage capacities and transfer rates. For example, a hard drive advertised as 1 terabyte (TB) is closer to 931 gibibytes (GiB) than 1000 gibibytes.