| Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exaoctet per second | 6.93889390391 Eibit/s |
| 2 Exaoctets per second | 13.8777878078 Eibit/s |
| 3 Exaoctets per second | 20.8166817117 Eibit/s |
| 4 Exaoctets per second | 27.7555756156 Eibit/s |
| 5 Exaoctets per second | 34.6944695195 Eibit/s |
| 10 Exaoctets per second | 69.3889390391 Eibit/s |
| 20 Exaoctets per second | 138.777878078 Eibit/s |
| 25 Exaoctets per second | 173.472347598 Eibit/s |
| 50 Exaoctets per second | 346.944695195 Eibit/s |
| 100 Exaoctets per second | 693.889390391 Eibit/s |
| Reference | Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 7 × 10-15 Eo/s | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.25 × 10-11 Eo/s | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.25 × 10-10 Eo/s | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 3.125 × 10-12 Eo/s | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
The exaoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand petaoctets per second, or eight exabits per second. Its symbol is Eo/s. Nothing built runs at this rate: it is about eight times the total traffic of the entire internet, counted across every network on the planet at once.
The unit is useful mainly for thought experiments about limits. If every hard drive and flash chip manufactured in a year were read simultaneously at full speed, the combined rate would be in this range. So would the total output of every camera sensor in every phone on Earth if they all recorded at once. These are sums over the whole world's hardware, not rates any system experiences.
There is one situation in which very large data volumes really do move faster than any network, and it puts the unit in perspective. Physically shipping a container of hard drives across an ocean transfers more data per second, averaged over the journey, than any cable. A shipping container holding a few exaoctets crossing the Atlantic in a week works out to several gigaoctets per second, and a truck of drives driven across a city beats almost any local link.
That calculation is not a joke; cloud providers offer it as a service. When a customer needs to move petaoctets into a data centre, the provider ships a lorry full of storage rather than attempting the transfer over a network, because the network would take months. The bandwidth of a vehicle is enormous, though its latency is measured in days.
For the unit itself, an exaoctet per second is 125 petaoctets per second, and it would transfer the world's entire stock of stored data — a few hundred zettaoctets — in about a week of continuous running. No mechanism exists to feed such a link, and none is being designed.
A converter must nevertheless handle the unit, because it appears in aggregate capacity models, in academic papers on the theoretical limits of communication, and in any table that lists the metric prefixes completely. A quantity does not need a use for its name to be well formed.
One exaoctet per second equals 1,000 petaoctets per second, 8 exabits per second, or about 0.8674 exbioctets per second.
The exbibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the sixtieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 pebibits per second. Its symbol is Eibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exabit per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
That fifteen per cent is more than the margin most engineering work allows anywhere. A quantity stated in the wrong convention at this level is not slightly imprecise but plainly wrong, and no amount of context recovers the intended figure once it has been written ambiguously. This is the situation the IEC prefixes were introduced to prevent.
No physical link approaches this rate. The unit describes aggregates: the total instantaneous traffic of the whole internet is roughly an exabit per second, so a binary exbibit per second is fifteen per cent more than everything moving on every network on the planet at a given moment.
Where a binary figure of this size arises naturally is in address arithmetic rather than in transmission. Two to the sixtieth is a number that appears throughout the design of 64-bit systems, and any rate derived from filling or traversing such an address space in a fixed time is naturally binary. Those calculations are theoretical, but they are the reason the unit is defined rather than left unnamed.
In octets an exbibit per second is 144,115,188,075,855,872, or 128 pebioctets per second. That is more storage moved per second than the world manufactures in several years, which is a way of saying that no source and no destination for such a flow could exist.
For a converter the treatment is mechanical and must be exact. Eibit/s and Ebit/s differ by an eighth, and a tool that treats them as interchangeable has introduced an error larger than the difference between many neighbouring units. The lowercase i is not decoration.
One exbibit per second equals 1,024 pebibits per second, 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets per second, or about 1.153 exabits per second.