Mbps vs MB

Not everyone is tech-savvy and understands tech jargon and acronyms including techies. We sometimes end up interchanging terms or confusing them.

Mbps and MB are one of the most confusing acronyms that may lead one into believing that they mean the same. Though they all relate to data, they mean two different things.

Mbps is a measure of data speed while MB is a measure of data volume or storage space. Bits and bytes are both units of data but bytes are bigger than bits where a byte is made up of 8 bits.

Computers deal in binary meaning either a 0 or 1 which is a bit with eight bits making up 1 byte.

So, what exactly is Mbps

Mbps is an acronym for Megabits per second. The data speed of bits that can move between two devices in a second is measured in bits per second or bps. In terms of internet speed, this is the number of bits that get to your device per second. It’s also called the download speed or bandwidth. A Kbps (kilobit per second)is equivalent to 1, 000 bps, 1 Mbps (megabit per second) is equivalent to 1, 000, 000 bps, and 1 Gbps (Gigabit per second) is equivalent to 1, 000, 000, 000 bps making it the fastest. Technically, you could also measure speed in bytes by taking speed in bps and convert it into bytes per second by dividing it by 8. However, this isn’t advised since speed is never measured in bytes.

And MB…?

MB or Megabyte on the other hand is a measure of data volume. When buying say a PC, mobile phone, or flash disk you’ll notice the storage capacity being advertised on the device being in GB or TB. Storage is measured in bytes with 1 kilobyte being equivalent to 1024 bytes. Therefore, 1 KB is the same as 1024 X 8 coming to 8192 bits. 1 megabyte is made up of 1, 000, 000 bytes and 1024 KB. Basically, a GB is equivalent to 1024 MB and a terabyte is equal to 1024 GB.

Now another thing to note about MB is when you transfer data say from your PC to an external device like your flash disk. You’ll notice the transfer speed is denoted by MB/s. This means that the file that you are sending to the flash drive or receiving is being transmitted at say 40 MB per second.

Why does it matter

When dealing with downloads, most people tend to think that the file size determines how first the file will be downloaded. For example, if the file is size is 500 Mb and your internet speed is 100 Mbps, you might confuse and think that the file will take around 5 minutes to finish downloading. What you fail to catch is that the ‘b’ in both the file size and the internet speed arent the same. One is in capital while the other one is small. However, since the file is eight times bigger than your original estimate, it will actually take 8 times longer to download which translates to around 40 seconds.

When it comes to data transfer say between your PC and flash disk, the data is transferred in Megabytes per second(MB/s). This means that a file size of 500 MB will take 10 minutes to be complete data at a transfer speed of 50 MB/s.

FAQs

What’s the difference between RAM, and storage space yet they’re both expressed in bytes?

Though they’re both expressed in MB or GB, RAM and storage space are different. Both RAM and storage space are for storing data but RAM, also known as memory only stores data temporarily while storage space stores it for a long time. If you were to switch off your device and power it back on, you’ll still see your files on the hard disk. That’s why RAM is usually way smaller.

Why am I seeing less hard drive space than the one indicated on the product?

Manufacturers market hard drives in terms of decimal or base 10 capacities. For example, 1 MB in decimal notation is equal to 1, 000, 000 bytes. However, programs like Windows, BIOS, and older macOS versions use the binary system or base 2 where 1 MB is equal to 1, 048, 576 bytes. Despite this, the storage capacity is the same, only that it’s being expressed in different ways.