Is meg the same as a megabyte?

Answer 1

Yes and no.

A megabyte was originally 220 bytes, as a kilobyte was 210 bytes. 220 is 1,048,576, so a megabyte was 1,048,576 bytes. In the early 1980's, though, sales people for hard drive companies decided that if they arbitrarily defined a megabyte as precisely 1,000,000 bytes, it would make their hard drives seem larger and thus would make them more likely to sell.

Today we still see that same distinction. When you are buying hard drives, they are measured in "marketing megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes," which are precisely 1,000,000 bytes, 1,000,000,000 bytes, and 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, respectively. However, when you are talking about computer memory, or when you ask the operating system (Windows, OSX, or Linux for example) about disk space, the answer you get back will always be counted in old-style megabytes / gigabytes / terabytes. And this is why a 1.5TB hard drive that you buy will only seem to have 1.2TB when you look at it in Windows after you have installed it. The number of bytes will be the same, but a true terabyte, 240 bytes, is larger than the terabytes used to define the drive size for sale.

Continuation

A megabyte is exactly 220 bytes in binary. Decimal does not align with binary bit boundaries so the decimal equivalence of binary numbers are always off counts.

20 = 1

21 = 210

22 = 410

23 = 810

24 = 1610

25 = 3210

26 = 6410

27 = 12810

28 = 25610

29 = 51210

210 = 102410

211 = 204810

212 = 409610

213 = 819210

214 = 16,38410

215 = 32,76810

216 = 65,53610

232 = 4,294,967,29610

264 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,61610

2128 = 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+3810

...

Answer 2

Yes it is the same.

It's like GB for gigabytes

or TB for terabytes

:D