| Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) | Pebibits per second (Pibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Zebibit per second | 1048576 Pibit/s |
| 2 Zebibits per second | 2097152 Pibit/s |
| 3 Zebibits per second | 3145728 Pibit/s |
| 4 Zebibits per second | 4194304 Pibit/s |
| 5 Zebibits per second | 5242880 Pibit/s |
| 10 Zebibits per second | 10485760 Pibit/s |
| 20 Zebibits per second | 20971520 Pibit/s |
| 25 Zebibits per second | 26214400 Pibit/s |
| 50 Zebibits per second | 52428800 Pibit/s |
| 100 Zebibits per second | 104857600 Pibit/s |
| Reference | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) | Pebibits per second (Pibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.74338 × 10-17 Zibit/s | 4.9738 × 10-11 Pibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.47033 × 10-14 Zibit/s | 0.0000000888178 Pibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.47033 × 10-13 Zibit/s | 0.000000888178 Pibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.11758 × 10-14 Zibit/s | 0.0000000222045 Pibit/s |
The zebibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the seventieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 exbibits per second. Its symbol is Zibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the zettabit per second, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent — approaching a fifth.
Nothing runs at this rate, and nothing is designed to. A zebibit per second is about a thousand times the total instantaneous traffic of the internet, and it would move the world's entire stock of stored data in a matter of minutes. The unit exists because the IEC series, like the metric series it parallels, was defined completely rather than only as far as anyone then needed.
That completeness is a deliberate design principle rather than an oversight. A measurement system whose names run out at some arbitrary point forces every future user to improvise an extension, and improvised extensions conflict with one another. Defining the whole ladder in advance costs nothing and removes the possibility.
The eighteen per cent gap at this level is the clearest illustration of why the binary series was needed at all. At the kibibit the two conventions differed by 2.4 per cent, which nobody noticed; the discrepancy multiplies by 1.024 at each step, and by here it is large enough that no reader could treat the two labels as interchangeable even in casual writing.
In octets a zebibit per second is 147,573,952,589,676,412,928, or 128 exbioctets per second. Expressing the same rate in every unit on the scale is an exercise rather than an application, but it is one a converter has to perform correctly, because the arithmetic does not become approximate when the quantity becomes unreachable.
The practical lesson is the one the whole binary series teaches: the lowercase i is not optional. It is the only mark in a written figure that distinguishes a power of two from a power of ten, and by this point in the scale the two are nearly a fifth apart.
One zebibit per second equals 1,024 exbibits per second, 147,573,952,589,676,412,928 octets per second, or about 1.181 zettabits per second.
The pebibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 tebibits per second, which is two to the fiftieth power bits per second. Its symbol is Pibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the petabit per second, and the two differ by 12.6 per cent.
No deployed system runs at this rate, and the unit therefore describes either an aggregate or a laboratory result. Optical transmission records set on single fibres reach a petabit per second, and the binary figure for the same experiment is 12.6 per cent lower — a difference that matters when comparing results between papers that use different conventions.
Where the unit is genuinely appropriate is in describing structures built from powers of two. The total switching capacity of a very large network fabric, built from ports and buffers that are all binary, is a binary quantity divided by time, and reporting it in decimal units discards the arithmetic that produced it. The same applies to the summed memory bandwidth of a machine whose channel count is a power of two.
In octets a pebibit per second is 140,737,488,355,328, which is 128 tebioctets per second. That is the storage of a thousand large consumer drives moved every second, and it exists only as a total across many thousands of parallel paths inside a single facility.
The size of the discrepancy at this level is the argument for the whole IEC series in miniature. What began as a harmless 2.4 per cent at the kibibit is now an eighth, and it compounds by 2.4 per cent at every further step. A convention that was acceptable for small numbers becomes untenable for large ones, and the point of the binary prefixes is to make the distinction visible before that happens.
For a converter, the arithmetic is unremarkable: multiply or divide by 1,024 the appropriate number of times, and by eight to reach octets. What matters is that the tool does not silently substitute the decimal unit when it sees a value it cannot label precisely.
One pebibit per second equals 1,024 tebibits per second, 140,737,488,355,328 octets per second, or about 1.126 petabits per second.