Definition

yottabyte

A yottabyte is a measure of theoretical storage capacity and is 2 to the 80th power bytes or, in decimal, approximately a thousand zettabytes, a trillion terabytes, or a million trillion megabytes.

Written out in decimal, a yottabyte looks like this:

1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176

The prefix is based on the Greek letter iota. According to Paul McFedries' The Word Spy, it would take approximately 86 trillion years to download a 1-yottabyte file, and the entire contents of the Library of Congress would consume a mere 10 terabytes.

This was last updated in September 2005
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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