| Exbioctets (Eio) | Yottaoctets (Yo) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet | 0.00000115292150461 Yo |
| 2 Exbioctets | 0.00000230584300921 Yo |
| 3 Exbioctets | 0.00000345876451382 Yo |
| 4 Exbioctets | 0.00000461168601843 Yo |
| 5 Exbioctets | 0.00000576460752303 Yo |
| 10 Exbioctets | 0.0000115292150461 Yo |
| 20 Exbioctets | 0.0000230584300921 Yo |
| 25 Exbioctets | 0.0000288230376152 Yo |
| 50 Exbioctets | 0.0000576460752303 Yo |
| 100 Exbioctets | 0.000115292150461 Yo |
| Reference | Exbioctets (Eio) | Yottaoctets (Yo) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.38778 × 10-16 Eio | 1.6 × 10-22 Yo |
| A three-minute MP3 | 2.60209 × 10-12 Eio | 3 × 10-18 Yo |
| A smartphone photo | 3.46945 × 10-12 Eio | 4 × 10-18 Yo |
| A high-definition film | 0.00000000346945 Eio | 4 × 10-15 Yo |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 0.0000000433681 Eio | 5 × 10-14 Yo |
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 yottaoctet is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand zettaoctets, or a septillion octets — a one followed by twenty-four zeros. Its symbol is Yo. Nothing that exists is measured in yottaoctets; the unit describes a quantity of data the world has not yet produced.
The total data held by humanity is currently estimated in the low hundreds of zettaoctets, so the world is a small fraction of the way to its first yottaoctet. On the growth rates of the last two decades, that threshold would be crossed sometime in the 2040s, though every long-range forecast in this field has been wrong in both directions.
The physical obstacles are severe. At the storage densities of current hard drives, a yottaoctet would need something like a hundred billion units. Manufacturing them at present rates would take centuries, powering them would need the electrical output of many countries, and housing them would require a building programme without precedent. The number is not absurd, but it is far beyond the current industrial base.
Research into higher-density storage exists partly because of this ceiling. DNA data storage, which encodes information in synthetic genetic sequences, offers densities millions of times higher than magnetic media, and a yottaoctet of DNA would fit in a room rather than a continent. Reading and writing it remain slow and costly, but the density argument is what keeps the field funded.
The yottaoctet also appears in claims that turn out to be exaggerated. Reports that intelligence agencies were building yottaoctet-scale facilities circulated widely in the 2010s and were not supported by the construction, the power supply or the storage market. Any claim about a yottaoctet of anything can be checked against total world manufacturing, which is a useful discipline.
Between 1991 and 2022 the yotta prefix was the top of the metric ladder, which is why it was the natural unit for speculative claims. The addition of ronna and quetta in 2022 gave the system three more decimal orders above it, and it is telling that this was done partly because data quantities were approaching the old ceiling.
One yottaoctet equals 1,000 zettaoctets, 1,000,000,000,000,000 gigaoctets, 8 yottabits, or about 0.8272 yobioctets.