| Zettabits (Zbit) | Exbioctets (Eio) |
|---|---|
| 1 Zettabit | 108.420217249 Eio |
| 2 Zettabits | 216.840434497 Eio |
| 3 Zettabits | 325.260651746 Eio |
| 4 Zettabits | 433.680868994 Eio |
| 5 Zettabits | 542.101086243 Eio |
| 10 Zettabits | 1084.20217249 Eio |
| 20 Zettabits | 2168.40434497 Eio |
| 25 Zettabits | 2710.50543121 Eio |
| 50 Zettabits | 5421.01086243 Eio |
| 100 Zettabits | 10842.0217249 Eio |
| Reference | Zettabits (Zbit) | Exbioctets (Eio) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.28 × 10-18 Zbit | 1.38778 × 10-16 Eio |
| A three-minute MP3 | 2.4 × 10-14 Zbit | 2.60209 × 10-12 Eio |
| A smartphone photo | 3.2 × 10-14 Zbit | 3.46945 × 10-12 Eio |
| A high-definition film | 3.2 × 10-11 Zbit | 0.00000000346945 Eio |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 4 × 10-10 Zbit | 0.0000000433681 Eio |
The zettabit is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand exabits, or a sextillion bits — a one followed by twenty-one zeros. Its symbol is Zbit. It is the largest unit in which real, measured quantities of data are still routinely reported, and it entered common use only in the last fifteen years.
A zettabit is 125 exaoctets. The phrase that made the prefix familiar was the zettabyte era, coined for the moment around 2016 when annual global internet traffic first exceeded one zettaoctet. That threshold arrived a little over a decade after annual traffic first passed one exaoctet, which gives a fair sense of the growth rate involved.
Estimates of the total quantity of data in existence are given in zettaoctets. The global datasphere — everything stored on every server, disc, phone and memory card, plus everything created and immediately discarded — is put at somewhere above a hundred zettaoctets, which is more than eight hundred zettabits. Nobody counts this directly; the figures come from manufacturing statistics and modelling.
Almost all of that is machine-generated and never read by anyone. Surveillance video that is recorded and overwritten, sensor telemetry, logs, backups and the many copies that redundancy demands account for the overwhelming majority. The portion that a human being has ever looked at is a tiny fraction of the total, and shrinking as a share every year.
The prefix zetta was adopted in 1991, along with yotta, at a conference that also had to consider what letters remained available. Z and Y were chosen partly because they were unused, and the pattern of naming from the Greek and Latin numerals had by then become loose. The 2022 additions of ronna and quetta continued the ladder upward for the same reason.
For perspective, a zettabit of information written as text in a single line of characters would stretch far beyond the solar system. The unit does not describe anything a person can hold or handle; it describes a civilisation's accumulated output, and it is useful precisely because that quantity now needs a name.
One zettabit equals 1,000 exabits, 125 exaoctets, or about 0.8470 zebibits.
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.