| Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Yottabits per second (Ybit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gibioctet per second | 8.589934592 × 10-15 Ybit/s |
| 2 Gibioctets per second | 1.7179869184 × 10-14 Ybit/s |
| 3 Gibioctets per second | 2.5769803776 × 10-14 Ybit/s |
| 4 Gibioctets per second | 3.4359738368 × 10-14 Ybit/s |
| 5 Gibioctets per second | 4.294967296 × 10-14 Ybit/s |
| 10 Gibioctets per second | 8.589934592 × 10-14 Ybit/s |
| 20 Gibioctets per second | 1.7179869184 × 10-13 Ybit/s |
| 25 Gibioctets per second | 2.147483648 × 10-13 Ybit/s |
| 50 Gibioctets per second | 4.294967296 × 10-13 Ybit/s |
| 100 Gibioctets per second | 8.589934592 × 10-13 Ybit/s |
| Reference | Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Yottabits per second (Ybit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.00000651926 Gio/s | 5.6 × 10-20 Ybit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0116415 Gio/s | 1 × 10-16 Ybit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.116415 Gio/s | 1 × 10-15 Ybit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.00291038 Gio/s | 2.5 × 10-17 Ybit/s |
The gibioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,073,741,824 octets per second, which is 1,024 mebioctets per second. Its symbol is Gio/s. It is the unit of memory bandwidth and of the fastest storage interfaces, and the binary counterpart of the gigaoctet per second, from which it differs by 7.4 per cent.
Memory is where the unit belongs most naturally. A memory channel transfers a fixed number of octets per clock cycle, and that number is a power of two, so the resulting bandwidth is a binary multiple of the clock frequency. A machine with several channels reaches tens of gibioctets per second, and an accelerator with stacked memory reaches thousands.
Storage has caught up. A fast solid-state drive on the current interface sustains several gibioctets per second, which means that for the first time the drive and the memory are within an order of magnitude of each other. That convergence has changed how software is written: the old assumption that reading from disc is thousands of times slower than reading from memory no longer holds.
The unit appears in benchmark output, in system monitoring displays and in the specifications of processor interconnects. All of these count in binary because the structures they measure are binary, and reporting the result with a decimal prefix would introduce a seven per cent error for the sake of a familiar-looking label.
For a sense of what the rate means, one gibioctet per second copies a two-gigaoctet film in under two seconds and fills a one-teraoctet drive in about a quarter of an hour. Anything at this speed is faster than every external connection in an ordinary building, so the limiting factor moves inside the machine.
The distinction from the decimal unit matters most in procurement and capacity planning. A specification that requires 10 gigaoctets per second and a system that delivers 10 gibioctets per second are not the same, and the difference of 7.4 per cent is the sort of margin that decides whether a design meets its requirement.
One gibioctet per second equals 1,073,741,824 octets per second, 1,024 mebioctets per second, or about 1.074 gigaoctets per second.
The yottabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand zettabits per second. Its symbol is Ybit/s. For thirty years it was the largest rate the metric system could name, and it describes a speed that has no application anywhere: not in engineering, not in research, and not in any forecast that anyone takes seriously.
Its distance from reality is easy to state. Global internet traffic averages roughly one exabit per second, so a yottabit per second is about a million times the combined communication of the entire human species. The largest single link ever built runs at a few hundred terabits per second, which is a ten-billionth of this figure.
The unit is nonetheless properly defined, and that completeness is the point. The metric system's rule is that every prefix combines with every unit without exception, so a reader who has never seen Ybit/s can decode it from the prefix alone. A system with gaps would need a table of which combinations are legal, and a table is exactly what a rule-based system exists to avoid.
There is a physical way to think about the number. A yottabit per second is 125 zettaoctets per second, and the total quantity of data humanity has ever stored is a few hundred zettaoctets. A link at this rate would therefore transmit the entire accumulated information of the species in a couple of seconds. No such body of data exists in one place to be sent, and nothing at the far end could receive it.
The prefix yotta was adopted in 1991 alongside zetta, at a conference that also had to consider which letters remained free. It stood at the top of the metric ladder until 2022, when ronna and quetta were added above it, partly because data quantities were beginning to approach the old ceiling. Rates have not followed quantities upward at the same pace.
For a converter, handling the unit is a matter of consistency rather than utility. A tool that converts every metric prefix correctly does not need to decide which of them anyone will use, and a figure written in yottabits per second — however unlikely — converts by the same rule as any other.
One yottabit per second equals 1,000 zettabits per second, 125 zettaoctets per second, or about 0.8272 yobibits per second.