Zettabyte. A thousand exabytes. A million petabytes. A billion terabytes . 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or maybe it’s 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes, depending how you count.* Regardless, it’s a lot of bytes.
You’ve likely heard of a terabyte, which is about the size of a computer’s disk these days, or a high-end phone’s memory. But where did these peta-, exa-, and zetta– things come from? Some examples:
- Petabytes: the digital storage a hospital might need for all its imaging; or the storage for all the movies at a streaming company like Netflix.
- Exabytes: the amount of storage needed by large cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.
- Zettabytes: the storage for all the digital data in the world; or the estimated storage needed to capture one human connectome.
Wait, what was that last one? Capturing one human connectome, someday, will require as much storage as the whole world needs today? You heard it here first (or perhap from a site like zetta.ai).
And one final opportunity for “You Heard it Here First”: Yottabyte! Especially with the growth of AI, all the world’s storage is heading towards a yottabyte.
*If, like most of us, you count by powers of ten, it’s the nice even number. 10^21. If, like computers, you count by powers of two, it’s the not so even number. 2^70.