Exabyte

For the company that manufactures data backup products, see Exabyte Corporation

Multiple-byte units
Decimal Value Metric 1000 kB kilobyte 10002 MB megabyte 10003 GB gigabyte 10004 TB terabyte 10005 PB petabyte 10006 EB exabyte 10007 ZB zettabyte 10008 YB yottabyte 10009 RB ronnabyte 100010 QB quettabyte	Binary Value IEC Memory 1024 KiB kibibyte KB kilobyte 10242 MiB mebibyte MB megabyte 10243 GiB gibibyte GB gigabyte 10244 TiB tebibyte TB terabyte 10245 PiB pebibyte — 10246 EiB exbibyte — 10247 ZiB zebibyte — 10248 YiB yobibyte — — —
Orders of magnitude of data

An exabyte (derived from the SI prefix exa-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quintillion (one long scale trillion) bytes. It is commonly abbreviated EB.

Because of irregularities in using the binary prefix in the definition and usage of the kilobyte, the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:

• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes – 1000⁶, or 10¹⁸.
• 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes – 1024⁶, or 2⁶⁰. This capacity may be expressed unambiguously as an exbibyte.

As of 2005, exabytes of data are almost never encountered in a practical context. For example, the total amount of printed material in the world is estimated to be around five exabytes. However, one may hear of 16 exabytes (exbibytes) of address space when discussing 64-bit architectures.

As of September 2005, no one has made a tape capable of holding a full exabyte.

It is estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human knowledge (including audio, video and text) was 12 exabytes. [1]

See also

• exbibyte
• exabit
• binary prefix
• orders of magnitude (data)