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According to these standards, kilo, mega, giga, et seq. should only be used in the decimal sense, even when referring to data storage capacities: kilobyte and megabyte denote one thousand and one million bytes respectively (consistent with the metric system), while terms such as kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte, with symbols KiB, MiB and GiB ...
A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic.Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol.
Mega is a unit prefix in metric systems of units denoting a factor of one million (10 6 or 1 000 000). It has the unit symbol M . It was confirmed for use in the International System of Units (SI) in 1960.
In the context of computing, the metric prefixes are often intended to mean something other than their normal meaning. For example, a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes even though the standard meaning of kilo is 1000. And, mega normally means one million, but in computing is often used to mean 2 20 = 1 048 576. The table below illustrates the ...
The byte has been a commonly used unit of measure for much of the information age to refer to a number of bits.In the early days of computing, it was used for differing numbers of bits based on convention and computer hardware design, but today means 8 bits.
The relative difference between the values in the binary and decimal interpretations increases, when using the SI prefixes as the base, from 2.4% for kilo to nearly 27% for the quetta prefix. Although the prefixes ronna and quetta have been defined, as of 2022 no names have been officially assigned to the corresponding binary prefixes.
Standards bodies have deprecated this binary usage of the mega- prefix in favor of a new set of binary prefixes, [2] by means of which the quantity 2 20 B is named mebibyte (symbol MiB). Definitions The unit megabyte is commonly used for 1000 2 (one million) bytes or 1024 2 bytes.
The difference between units based on decimal and binary prefixes increases as a semi-logarithmic (linear-log) function—for example, the decimal kilobyte value is nearly 98% of the kibibyte, a megabyte is under 96% of a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% of a gibibyte value. This means that a 300 GB (279 GiB) hard disk might be ...