How many megabytes are in a gigabyte?

In the decimal (SI) system used by storage manufacturers, 1 GB = 1,000 MB. In the binary system used by operating systems, 1 GiB = 1,024 MiB. This difference is why a '500 GB' hard drive shows as about 465 GB in Windows.

Why does my hard drive show less space than advertised?

Manufacturers use decimal gigabytes (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) while operating systems use binary gibibytes (1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes). A '1 TB' drive has 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, which is about 931 GiB as shown by your OS.

What is the difference between MB and MiB?

MB (megabyte) officially means 1,000,000 bytes (10^6). MiB (mebibyte) means 1,048,576 bytes (2^20). The IEC introduced binary prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi) in 1998 to eliminate ambiguity, but adoption has been slow.

How Many Megabytes in a Gigabyte?

The Quick Answer

Decimal (SI): 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000,000 bytes

Binary (IEC): 1 GiB = 1,024 MiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes

Digital Storage Scale

Unit	Decimal (bytes)	Binary (bytes)	Difference
Kilobyte/Kibibyte	1,000	1,024	2.4%
Megabyte/Mebibyte	1,000,000	1,048,576	4.9%
Gigabyte/Gibibyte	1,000,000,000	1,073,741,824	7.4%
Terabyte/Tebibyte	10¹²	2⁴⁰	10.0%

What Fits in 1 GB?

Content Type	Approximate Count per GB
Text documents	500,000 pages
MP3 songs (4 min, 128 kbps)	250 songs
Photos (3 MB each)	333 photos
HD video	30-60 minutes
4K video	5-10 minutes

Advertised vs Actual Storage

Advertised (Decimal)	Actual (Binary)	"Missing"
128 GB	119.2 GiB	8.8 GB
256 GB	238.4 GiB	17.6 GB
512 GB	476.8 GiB	35.2 GB
1 TB	931.3 GiB	68.7 GB
2 TB	1,862.6 GiB	137.4 GB

Use our digital storage converter for precise conversions.