| Mebibits (Mibit) | Pebioctets (Pio) |
|---|---|
| 1 Mebibit | 1.16415321827 × 10-10 Pio |
| 2 Mebibits | 2.32830643654 × 10-10 Pio |
| 3 Mebibits | 3.49245965481 × 10-10 Pio |
| 4 Mebibits | 4.65661287308 × 10-10 Pio |
| 5 Mebibits | 5.82076609135 × 10-10 Pio |
| 10 Mebibits | 0.00000000116415321827 Pio |
| 20 Mebibits | 0.00000000232830643654 Pio |
| 25 Mebibits | 0.00000000291038304567 Pio |
| 50 Mebibits | 0.00000000582076609135 Pio |
| 100 Mebibits | 0.0000000116415321827 Pio |
| Reference | Mebibits (Mibit) | Pebioctets (Pio) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 0.0012207 Mibit | 1.42109 × 10-13 Pio |
| A three-minute MP3 | 22.8882 Mibit | 0.00000000266454 Pio |
| A smartphone photo | 30.5176 Mibit | 0.00000000355271 Pio |
| A high-definition film | 30517.6 Mibit | 0.00000355271 Pio |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 381470 Mibit | 0.0000444089 Pio |
The mebibit is a unit of digital information equal to 1,048,576 bits, which is 1,024 kibibits or two to the twentieth power. Its symbol is Mibit. It is the binary counterpart of the megabit, and the difference between the two has grown to 4.9 per cent — small enough to be ignored casually, large enough to matter in a specification.
Its natural home is semiconductor memory, where capacity is fixed by the address lines on the chip. A memory die with twenty address bits can reach exactly 1,048,576 locations, so densities land on powers of two rather than on round decimal numbers. A chip described as 512 megabits in a catalogue is very often 512 mebibits in reality, which is 537 megabits, and the datasheet is where the truth is written.
That habit is old and deliberate. Semiconductor manufacturers have always sized memory in binary because the wiring makes any other choice wasteful: an address bus is a fixed number of lines, and using only part of the range it can reach throws away silicon. Storage manufacturers had no such constraint, which is precisely why the two industries diverged.
For a sense of quantity, a mebibit is 131,072 octets, or about 128 kibioctets. That is roughly the contents of a long book as plain text, or a single low-resolution image. In network terms it is a hundredth of a second of a gigabit link.
The IEC prefixes were introduced in 1998 partly because at this level and above the approximation stops being safe. Buying a component described as one megabit and receiving one mebibit is a five per cent surprise; at the tebibit the same confusion is a ten per cent surprise, and in a contract for a data centre that is a real sum of money.
Correct usage is now common in standards documents, in hardware datasheets and in operating system internals, and rare in advertising and consumer software. The best rule when reading a figure is to ask which industry produced it: if it describes memory or a chip, assume binary; if it describes storage or a link, assume decimal.
One mebibit equals 1,048,576 bits, 1,024 kibibits, 131,072 octets, or about 1.049 megabits.
The pebioctet is a unit of digital information equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624 octets, which is 1,024 tebioctets. Its symbol is Pio. It is the binary counterpart of the petaoctet, and the two now differ by 12.6 per cent.
This is the unit in which filesystem limits are written. Several widely deployed filesystems have maximum file or volume sizes that are exact powers of two, and those limits fall in this range: sixteen tebioctets for one, a pebioctet for another, eight pebioctets for a third. The numbers are not choices made by anyone; they follow from how many bits the filesystem uses to number its blocks.
Large scientific and commercial storage systems are also sized here. A research computing centre may run a filesystem of several pebioctets across thousands of drives, and the tools that manage it report in pebioctets because the underlying allocation is binary throughout. Converting those figures to decimal units for a report introduces an error of an eighth for no benefit.
A pebioctet is roughly a thousand large consumer hard drives, or the complete video output of a broadcaster over many years. It is also close to the size of the largest single scientific archives, though those are typically stated in petaoctets by press offices and in pebioctets by the engineers who run them, which produces two different numbers for the same building.
Distinguishing the two is not pedantry at this level. A twelve per cent difference on a purchase of many pebioctets is a large sum of money, and a capacity plan built on the wrong unit will be wrong by more than the margin most plans allow. This is precisely the situation the IEC prefixes were introduced to prevent.
The symbol Pio is used in filesystem documentation, in storage system manuals and in standards. Where a source writes PB without saying which it means, the difference is an eighth, and the honest thing for a reader to do is treat the figure as approximate rather than assume one convention or the other.
One pebioctet equals 1,024 tebioctets, 1,125,899,906,842,624 octets, 8 pebibits, or about 1.126 petaoctets.