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yottabyte (YB)

By Alexander S. Gillis

What is a yottabyte (YB)?

A yottabyte (YB) is a measure of theoretical storage capacity and data volumes equal to 2 to the 80th power bytes, or approximately a million trillion megabytes (MB). This measure is used to denote the size of data.

The prefix yotta is based on the Greek letter iota. In decimal format, a yottabyte is written as 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176.

Currently, there is nothing that can be measured on a yottabyte scale.

According to Paul McFedries' book Word Spy, it would take approximately 86 trillion years to download a 1 YB file, and the entire contents of the Library of Congress would consume just 10 terabytes (TB).

How big is a yottabyte?

A yottabyte is the largest unit approved as a standard size by the International System of Units (SI). The yottabyte is about 1 septillion bytes -- or, as an integer, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. The storage volume is equivalent to a quadrillion gigabytes (GB) or a million trillion megabytes. By comparison, the average song file is around 10 MB to 30 MB.

A yottabyte is so much data that, according to backup vendor Backblaze Inc., a yottabyte of storage would take up a data center the size of the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. 

Yottabytes vs. terabytes vs. petabytes

While yottabyte storage is not yet in use, big data and the demand for higher-capacity drives grows every year.

One byte is the equivalent of 8 bits of data. Growing in order, other data examples include the following:

Manufacturers and professionals use a slightly different conversion method to simplify the numbers. Conversions are in steps of 1,000. For example, 1,000 bytes represents 1 KB; 1,000 KB represents 1 MB; 1,000 MB represents 1 GB; 1,000 EB represents 1 ZB, and so on. 

Hard drives scaling at a terabyte level are commonly available in the storage market. In 2015, DataDirect Networks, EMC Corp. (now Dell EMC), Fujitsu and HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a Western Digital brand) released petabyte-scale storage devices ranging from 4.6 PB to 50 PB. 

What’s bigger than a yottabyte?

Yotta is the biggest prefix recognized by the SI, mainly because there is currently no need for any bigger prefix. There are still other unofficial units that exist, however. For example, the brontobyte is one of the most well known.

A brontobyte is approximately 1,024 YB. Brontobyte is derived from the name Brontosaurus, one of the largest dinosaurs. Using simplified numbers, a brontobyte is equal to the number one followed by 27 zeros.

Is the yottabyte in use?

Yottabyte storage is not yet in use, and there is nothing yet currently big enough to measure in yottabytes. For example, in their blog post titled "How Much Data is Created Every Day?" job recruitment hub SeedScientific estimated the amount of global information created at the beginning of 2020 to be 44 ZB. By 2025, the projected amount of data generated each day globally will reach 463 EB.

In 2014, the U.S. Intelligence Community completed construction of the Utah Data Center, which was reportedly designed to handle yottabytes of data. However, experts estimated the $1.5 billion data center's capacity is between 3 EB and 12 EB. But according to the 2019 IEEE Spectrum article "Racing Toward Yottabyte Information," the world will reach data in the yottabytes within a decade. 

The history and evolution of bits and bytes

Learn about scale-out NAS and how it is designed to support volumes of up to 8 YB of data.

29 Sep 2021

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