Is 1 Gbps equal to 1000 Mbps or 1024 Mbps?

Is 1Gbps equal to 1000Mbps or 1024Mbps? How much MB/s is 1Gbps equal to ?

Possibly, you will get 2 answers:

• 1Gbps=1000Mbps=125MB/s（ Million Bytes per second）
• 1Gbps=1024Mbps=128MB/s（Million Bytes per second）

Which of the following is the best response? For the reference answer, you’ll need to know a few things first.

Megabyte and Mebibyte

Megabyte（Mega-byte，Abbreviated as MB）

Prefix Mega- is a decimal prefix, It is a capacity measurement unit, usually used to indicate the storage capacity of storage media, such as hard disks, memory, U disks, etc.

In decimal, the conversion is as follows:

• Gbps : Gigabit per second (Gbit/s or Gb/s)
• MB/s : Megabyte per second

• B=Byte
• b=bit
• 1 byte = 8 bits
• 1 bit = (1/8) bytes=0.125 bytes
• 1 Kbyte = 1000 byte
• 1 megabyte = 1000 Kbyte
• 1 megabyte = 1000² bytes
• 1 gigabit = 1000³ bits
• 1 gigabit = (1000 / 8) megabytes
• 1 gigabit = 125 megabytes
• 1 gigabit/second = 125 megabytes/second
• 1 Gbps = 125 MB/s

For example:

• USB 3.1 GEN2 transmission speed 10 Gbps = 1250 MB/s
• USB 3.1 GEN1 transmission speed 5 Gbps = 625 MB/s

Mebibyte (Mebi-byte, a unit of bytes in digital information, abbreviated as MiB)

The prefix Mebi- is a binary prefix, formulated by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1998. It is derived from the words mega and binary, which shows that Mebi and Mega in the International System of Units are very close in value.

In binary, the conversion is as follows:

• B=Byte
• b=bit
• Byte = 8 bit
• bit = (1/8) bytes=0.125 bytes
• 1 Kb =­ 1024 bit
• 1 Mb = 1024 Kb
• 1 KB = 1024 Byte
• 1 MB = 1024 KB
• 1GB（Gigabyte）=1024MB
• 1TB（Terabyte）=1024GB
• 1PB（Petabyte）=1024TB

For example:

If the capacity of a U disk is 10G, which is equal to: 10G = 10×1024÷8 = 1280 MB

Many people mix up the use of MB and MiB due to the fact that 2¹⁰=1024 in binary is nearly identical to 10³=1000 in decimal.

For comparison’s sake, 1MB is equal to 1000000 bytes (1000 x 1000 or 10⁶ bytes), while 1MiB is equal to 1048576 bytes (1024 x 1024 or 2²⁰ bytes).

The MiB (Mebibyte) is intended to be used in place of the MB (megabyte) on occasion; the two units have very similar values, but the MiB (2²⁰) is slightly larger in the International System of Units (SI). Below is a table showing the conversion of Mib to MB.

In simple terms, we can think of it like this:

• If there is no “i”, all of them default to decimal, that is, 1MB=103KB=1000KB
• In most cases (such as describing network speed), it is decimal
• In a few cases, such as “i” will appear in the internal storage of the computer, the binary system is used at this time, that is, 1MiB=210KiB=1024KiB

All of the major standards bodies have adopted MiB, but it is rarely used outside of the computer industry. Although 1 MB is equal to 1,000,000 bytes, the abbreviation “Mib” is more commonly used.

For files of the same storage size, Windows and Mac will show different sizes because Windows uses MiB (but Windows is abbreviated to MB, which is where the confusion begins) and Mac uses MB.

A 2²⁰ byte file will be displayed as 1.00 MB in all Windows versions (in fact, it should be 1MiB). This is also the case for Macs running OSes earlier than 10.6. After OS X 10.6, the size of files and disks is shown in Megabytes; a file with 1024 bytes is represented as 1MB.

Summary

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International System of Units (SI) each adopted a different system when they created the Megabyte and the Mebibyte, which is why the conversion between the two units is not a perfect one.

The two are very close in value to one another, but there is a clear distinction between them.

• if it’s referring to the amount of space available on a computer’s hard drive or other storage device. Mebibyte (MiB) is the correct binary unit, and 1Gbps (1024Mbps) = 128MB/s is the appropriate speed.

• One gigabit per second (1Gbps) is equal to one thousand megabits per second (1000Mbps), or 125 megabytes per second (MB/s).