Converting bytes to megabytes

Question

I\'ve seen three ways of doing conversion from bytes to megabytes:

1. megabytes=bytes/1000000
2. megabytes=bytes/1024/1024
3. megabytes=bytes/1024/100

Answer 1

In general, it's wrong to use decimal SI prefixes (e.g. kilo, mega) when referring to binary data sizes (except in casual usage). It's ambiguous and causes confusion. To be precise you can use binary prefixes (e.g. 1 mebibyte = 1 MiB = 1024 kibibytes = 2^20 bytes). When someone else uses decimal SI prefixes for binary data you need to get more information before you can know what is meant.