Is there a difference?

[Smokey]

Okay, I've been pondering this one for awhile...

What is the difference between a megabit and a megabyte? I know that a megabyte is roughly 1,000 kilobytes, but then what does that make a megabit?

[This message has been edited by Smokey (edited 03-12-2000).]

[[Neo770]]

You divide Mbits by 8 to get their real Kbyte or Mbyte so USB that is 12Mbits a second is really only 1.5 M bytes a second.

[OuTpaTienT]

A bit is a the smallest unit of data. It's what the computer works with at it's core. A bit is a single 0/1, yes/no, on/off, etc.

A byte is 8 bits. A byte is equivalent to one character of text. The various combinations of the bits within the the byte total 256. So a single byte can be any of 256 different characters.

I think that's correct. Basically when you see megabit, you need to divide it by 8 (like Neo said) to translate the figure to megabytes (which we're all more familiar with).

[Smokey]

So if an ethernet card is rated at 100 megabits per second, then it can really transfer 12.5 megabytes per second?

[rh71]

MB = megabytes
Mb = megabits

Look at it like this...

Your 'avg' 56k modem transfers ~5 kbytes/sec.

10Mbps Ethernet cards' CAPABLE throughput of 10Mbits/sec = 1000 kbytes/sec (1MByte/sec). (I avg about 150 kbytes/sec downloads with my cable modem service).

If you were to mistakenly call the 10Mbits/sec throughput 10MBytes/sec... well, would mean downloading a 20MByte file in 2 seconds. Not likely.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong... using this as a self-understanding as well.

[Smokey]

Okay... I think I understand a bit better now...

[Underclocked]

Okay, so what's a baud? http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[Smokey]

LOL Underclocked... is this a test? http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif

Ummmm... the way I understand it, a baud is like a byte, but transferred over a modem. Like when modems get described as 56,000 baud... something like that?