megabyte

Etymology

From mega- + byte.

noun

1. (computing, formal) One million (10⁶, or 1,000,000) bytes or 1,000 kilobytes.
   The IBM 2301 Drum Storage (Figure 20) provides random access storage of approximately 4 million bytes at a data rate of 1.2 megabytes per second. 1964, System/360 System Summary, IBM, page 27
   This 70-megabyte [69,889,536 bytes] data module contains fixed heads in addition to the normal access heads. 1973, Reference Manual for IBM 3340/3344 Disk Storage, IBM, page 3
2. (computing, informal) a mebibyte.
   One megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. One megahertz, however is a million Hertz. 2003, Michael Meyers, Managing and Troubleshooting PCs, page 933
   Defaults to 2 megabytes (2,097,152 bytes). 2004, Kerry Cox, Christopher Gerg, Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools, page 92
   By default, each log file … is exactly 5 megabytes (5,242,880 bytes) in size. 2006, Eriq Oliver Neale, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed, page 290