| Exbioctets (Eio) | Yobioctets (Yio) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet | 0.000000953674316406 Yio |
| 2 Exbioctets | 0.00000190734863281 Yio |
| 3 Exbioctets | 0.00000286102294922 Yio |
| 4 Exbioctets | 0.00000381469726562 Yio |
| 5 Exbioctets | 0.00000476837158203 Yio |
| 10 Exbioctets | 0.00000953674316406 Yio |
| 20 Exbioctets | 0.0000190734863281 Yio |
| 25 Exbioctets | 0.0000238418579102 Yio |
| 50 Exbioctets | 0.0000476837158203 Yio |
| 100 Exbioctets | 0.0000953674316406 Yio |
| Reference | Exbioctets (Eio) | Yobioctets (Yio) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.38778 × 10-16 Eio | 1.32349 × 10-22 Yio |
| A three-minute MP3 | 2.60209 × 10-12 Eio | 2.48154 × 10-18 Yio |
| A smartphone photo | 3.46945 × 10-12 Eio | 3.30872 × 10-18 Yio |
| A high-definition film | 0.00000000346945 Eio | 3.30872 × 10-15 Yio |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 0.0000000433681 Eio | 4.1359 × 10-14 Yio |
The exbioctet is a unit of digital information equal to two to the sixtieth power octets, which is 1,024 pebioctets. Its symbol is Eio. It is the binary counterpart of the exaoctet, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
One number involving this unit is quoted more than any other: sixteen exbioctets, the size of the address space a 64-bit processor can reach. Two to the sixty-fourth octets is 16 EiB, and that figure is the theoretical ceiling on the memory of every machine built on the architecture that has dominated computing since the mid-2000s.
The same limit reappears in filesystems. A filesystem that numbers its blocks with 64-bit values can address 16 exbioctets of blocks, and several modern designs state exactly that as their maximum volume size. Others state 8 exbioctets, having reserved one bit for a sign or a flag — a detail that halves the limit and is worth knowing when reading a specification.
Nothing approaches these sizes in practice. The largest storage systems in the world hold exaoctets, and the total of all data held by humanity is a few hundred zettaoctets, which is tens of thousands of exbioctets. The 64-bit ceiling was chosen precisely so that it would not be reached, and the transition from 32 bits, whose four-gibioctet limit was reached within a decade, is why the designers left so much room.
An exbioctet is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bits and 128 pebioctets. It is a quantity that exists in specifications, in address arithmetic and in the design documents of large systems, and nowhere else. Describing it in terms of photographs or films is not useful, because no collection of either comes close.
The symbol Eio and its decimal sibling Eo differ by more than an eighth, which is far too much to leave to inference. When a document writes EB in the context of an address space, it almost certainly means EiB, because address spaces are powers of two by construction; when it writes EB about stored data, it almost certainly means the decimal unit.
One exbioctet equals 1,024 pebioctets, 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 octets, 8 exbibits, or about 1.153 exaoctets.
The yobioctet is a unit of digital information equal to two to the eightieth power octets, which is 1,024 zebioctets. Its symbol is Yio. It is the largest binary unit the International Electrotechnical Commission has named, and the binary counterpart of the yottaoctet.
At this final step the binary and decimal conventions differ by 20.9 per cent. That is the end of the argument the IEC prefixes were created to settle: a difference that began as a harmless 2.4 per cent at the kibioctet has grown, by eight successive multiplications of 1.024, into a discrepancy of more than a fifth. No system of measurement can carry an ambiguity that large.
A yobioctet is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 octets. The entire quantity of data held by humanity is a few hundred zettaoctets, which is a fraction of a per cent of this. Nothing of this size has been built, and current manufacturing rates would need to continue for many centuries to accumulate one.
The binary series stops at yobi because the decimal series stopped at yotta when the IEC standard was written in 1998. When ronna and quetta were added to the metric system in 2022, no matching binary names were defined, so a quantity of two to the ninetieth octets has no accepted short form. That gap will presumably be filled if it is ever needed.
The value of defining the top of a ladder nobody has climbed is the same as the value of defining the bottom. A measurement system whose names run out forces its users to improvise, and improvised extensions conflict. Both the metric and the IEC series were written out in full so that the rule, rather than a table of exceptions, is all anyone has to learn.
For any reader of technical material, the lesson of the whole series is one character. Kio, Mio, Gio, Tio, Pio, Eio, Zio and Yio are binary; ko, Mo, Go, To, Po, Eo, Zo and Yo are decimal; and the difference between them widens from a rounding error to a fifth as you climb. That lowercase i is the only thing in a document that says which was meant.
One yobioctet equals 1,024 zebioctets, 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 octets, 8 yobibits, or about 1.209 yottaoctets.