4. Megabyte

sizesA megabyte is a unit of storage capacity. It can be written as MB or mbyte.

A Megabyte is generally thought of as one million bytes or 1,000 kilobytes. However, to be completely correct, it is actually 1,048,576 bytes or 1,024 kilobytes.

To help you visualise how much information can be stored on a megabyte, let us look again at the text you saw on the previous page which was equivalent in storage size to 1 kilobyte.

 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore fugiat

 

A megabyte would be able to store 1024 exact copies of this text. That would be the equivalent of around 300 typed essays.

PowerPoint presentations on the other hand can be quite large. For example, a ten slide presentation with an image on each slide and a theme applied to the slide backgrounds could be 2 or 3 megabytes in size.

A typical MP3 song can be anywhere between 3 to 5 megabytes in size.

A CD can store up to 650 megabytes of data.

 

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Megabyte