What are megabytes per second (MBps)?

Megabytes per second, also written as MBps in its ab­bre­vi­ated form, is a unit of meas­ure­ment used to describe the speed at which data is trans­ferred to and from computer storage devices. It differs from the unit of meas­ure­ment megabits per second, which measures network bandwidth and through­put. It’s also important to note that megabits per second is written with a lowercase b in its ab­bre­vi­ated form (Mbps).

What is MBps?

Megabytes per Second is a unit of meas­ure­ment used to measure how quickly data and in­form­a­tion is trans­ferred. A byte is made up of 8 bits, with a bit being the smallest unit of data in binary code. Bytes represent, among other things, different numbers and letters. Megabytes per second should not be confused with megabits per second, which is ab­bre­vi­ated as Mbps, the dif­fer­ence being the lowercase b.

MBps refers to the number of megabytes of data that can be trans­ferred within one second. The term megabytes per second can be broken down into three parts. The first part is the Greek prefix ‘mega-’, which stands for one million. The next part is bytes, which refers to data in binary form. The last part, per second, is necessary for the unit of meas­ure­ment to com­mu­nic­ate transfer speed and not just data volume. The size of data is rep­res­en­ted in megabytes, or MB. A video, for example, needs 200 MB of storage space. If you were to transfer the video to a hard drive that had a write speed of 160 megabytes per second, it would take 1.25 seconds.

What is the unit megabytes per second commonly used to describe?

The unit MBps is used to describe the speed at which data is trans­ferred to and from storage devices. This could, for example, be when data is read from and written to hard disks or when uploading a file to a cloud server using an Ethernet con­nec­tion. It is rather common for browsers to display the number of megabytes being trans­ferred per second. Using this number, browsers then provide an estimate for the total time required to transfer a file.

What is the dif­fer­ence between MBps and Mbps?

When referring to data transfer rates in the context of internet speed, the unit megabits per second is used. Due to the rather subtle spelling dif­fer­ence between MBps and Mbps, these units of speed tend to get mixed up. It’s important to remember that megabytes per second is written with a capital b and megabits is written with a lowercase b. While both describe the speed of data transfer, they are used for different purposes.

MBps indicates data transfer speed when files are being down­loaded or uploaded. Mbps, on the other hand, is used primarily for the purpose of com­mu­nic­at­ing internet speed. Together with the ping command, knowing the data transfer rate for an internet con­nec­tion (Mbps) can help you to evaluate its quality.

How to convert megabytes per second into megabits per second

Since one byte is made of 8 bits, if you want to convert a download speed shown in MBps into Mbps, simply multiply the number of megabytes by 8. If, however, you have an internet con­nec­tion speed of 200 megabits per second and you want to convert it into megabytes, you need to do divide 200 by 8. The cor­res­pond­ing download speed would be 25 megabytes per second.

The table below shows typical internet speeds. In the left column, these values have been converted to kilobits and in the right column, to megabytes. To calculate kilobits, multiply the number of megabits by 1,000.