Mbit/s, Mbps, or MB/s
Filed in archive Performance by James Koopmann on May 30, 2008
The best way I remember this whole confusing issue is by one simple little saying. Little 'b' equals little data (bits) and big 'B' equals big data (bytes). This may sound stupid but it is the only way I can delineate between bits and bytes. So how does this relate.
A megabit per second (Mbit/s or Mbps), most used is the Mbps, is equal to 1 million (1,000,000) bits per second.
To translate this into megabytes per second (MB/s) do the following:
Realize that there are 8 bits to a byte
So: (1,000,000 bits) / (8 bits / 1 byte) = 125,000 bytes/s (Bps)
Now suppose we are given the speed of a storage device in Mbps, take whatever Mbps you are given, multiply it by 125,000 to get the total Bps
Supposing we have 1.5Mbps:
1.5 * 125,000 = 187,500 Bps
Convert this to MB/s we devide by 1K (1024 bytes) to get in KB/s and then by another 1024 bytes to get MB/s:
(187,500 / 1024) / 1024 = .18MB/s
Happy converting. But really. This is very important when you go shoping around for a great deal on storage equipment. There is no way you would pay the same amount of monies for a USB 1.x device as a USB 2.0 device. There are just magnitude differences in speed.
For additional information on data rates
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