Yottabyte??

So, storage and file sizes are measured in bytes. As you know, one byte typically represents one character or letter. So, if you had a text phrase “Hello world”, that size would be 11 bytes, including the space. If you had a file that had approximately 1,000 letters, that is one Kilobyte. Now this is where this discussion gets interesting.

1,000 Kilobytes is 1 Megabyte. That’s a lot. That is one million characters, or about 3,000 pages of information. 1,000 Megabytes is a Gigabyte. That’s a lot. That is one billion characters, or about 3,000,000 pages of information. An average hard disk is now 500 Gigs. That’s a lot. Hard drive manufacturers are now producing 1 Terabyte drives. That is one trillion characters, or about 3 billion pages of information. What’s next? Here is a chart, (rounded and approximated):

1 Kilobyte = 1,000 bytes
1 Megabyte = 1,000 Kilobytes
1 Gigabyte = 1,000 Megabytes
1 Terabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes
1 Petabyte = 1,000 Terabytes
1 Exabyte = 1,000 Petabytes
1 Zettabyte = 1,000 Exabytes
1 Yottabyte = 1,000 Zettabytes

Side note: You can see then, that a Yottabyte is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 1 x 10^24. A Googol is 1 x 10^100, and yes, Google’s name is derived from this term.

Exactly how much data is a Yottabyte? According to one 2006 study, the storage capacity of all of the hard drives of all of the computers in all the world was 160 Exabytes at that time. If you had a 1 Yottabyte file, it would take about 11 trillion years to download it using a high-speed broadband internet connection. I’m looking forward to my next Dell computer, since I will try to spec it out with a 1 Yottabyte drive and 128 Exabytes of memory…that would be awesome.

Information courtesy of wikipedia.org and google.com