You have probably heard of megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. These are data measurement units applied to media storage. Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, and Zetta are prefixes used to indicate data quantity in bytes. But did you know that there is this thing called Yottabyte? The International System of Units officially approved it as the largest in the data measurement system. Though it is still not yet in use, the demand for storage devices with larger capacities continues to grow.
Before we dive into the larger and more complex units, let us review the basics. Let us get learn about the bit, byte, and megabyte.
A bit the foundation or basis unit of data storage. It is the smallest unit of data in a computer and is a binary digit. A bit can hold only one value, either 0 or 1. The size value of bits is so small that they are grouped together by eight to form what we call a byte. Unlike the bit that can only store values 0 or 1, a byte contains enough information to store a character like “a”. A group of One thousand twenty-four bytes is called a kilobyte. One thousand twenty-four kilobytes form one megabyte. The storage and memory capacity of computers are usually measured in the unit megabytes and gigabytes (MB and GB).
Yottabyte in comparison
To get an understanding of how big a yottabyte is, here’s a fact. Right now, there is nothing that can be measured using yottabyte. An average movie takes up 2 gigabytes. In one terabyte, there are 1,024 gigabytes. A terabyte is one of the largest storage media that is available in the market and is currently commercially used. 1,024 is equal to one petabyte. Four thousand digital photos every day of your life is equivalent to one petabyte. 1,024 petabytes is equal to One exabyte, and 1,024 exabytes is equal to One zettabyte. One zettabyte can contain like 30 billion 4K movies. With that, 1,024 zettabytes are equivalent to one yottabyte. Today, there is not enough data yet in the world to measure using yottabytes. Anticipating that the time that the data levels can reach the yottabyte scale, you be a decade from now.
The terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, and zettabyte in the industry
In the August of 2018, Samsung introduced the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, the world’s first phone to have terabyte storage. The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 has expandable storage that can reach up to 1 terabyte.
The petabyte, the next unit of data storage after the terabyte, is used in server farms or large computer networks. Some examples of companies that store data that reaches petabytes are Facebook, Youtube, and Google. These companies store more than 100 petabytes worth of data on their servers.
The world’s first-exabyte storage was created by StorageTek in January 2011 – the StorageTek T10000C FICON drive.
After over 36 years of experimentation, Seagate was able to create the first zettabyte storage. This zettabyte hard drive was made available in the market in the March of 2015. To see what this thing is capable of, here is a comparison. This storage device can store 60 billion video games, 7.5 MP3 songs, or 30 billion 4k movies. We all know that the internet is limitless. This huge network connects different devices all around the world. The data present on the internet is estimated to be forty zettabytes. That is how big a zettabyte is.
The yottabyte is more than enough since there isn’t even enough data to reach that level, for now. If the experts were right, within a decade, the world might be able to use enough data for the yottabyte. But for now, let us enjoy this amazing beauty of the yottabyte.
