| Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exaoctet per second | 7450580596.92 Gibit/s |
| 2 Exaoctets per second | 14901161193.8 Gibit/s |
| 3 Exaoctets per second | 22351741790.8 Gibit/s |
| 4 Exaoctets per second | 29802322387.7 Gibit/s |
| 5 Exaoctets per second | 37252902984.6 Gibit/s |
| 10 Exaoctets per second | 74505805969.2 Gibit/s |
| 20 Exaoctets per second | 149011611938 Gibit/s |
| 25 Exaoctets per second | 186264514923 Gibit/s |
| 50 Exaoctets per second | 372529029846 Gibit/s |
| 100 Exaoctets per second | 745058059692 Gibit/s |
| Reference | Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 7 × 10-15 Eo/s | 0.0000521541 Gibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.25 × 10-11 Eo/s | 0.0931323 Gibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.25 × 10-10 Eo/s | 0.931323 Gibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 3.125 × 10-12 Eo/s | 0.0232831 Gibit/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 gibibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,073,741,824 bits per second. Its symbol is Gibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the gigabit per second, and the two now differ by 7.4 per cent, which is enough to matter in any engineering specification.
The unit belongs to the inside of a machine rather than to the network. Memory buses, processor interconnects and the links between chips on the same board all move a power-of-two number of bits per clock cycle, so their throughput is naturally expressed with a binary prefix. A bus sixty-four bits wide clocked at a given frequency delivers a rate that is a binary multiple of that frequency.
Networking, by contrast, is decimal all the way down. Gigabit Ethernet carries exactly one thousand million bits per second, not 1,073,741,824, and the symbol rate on the wire is chosen to make that so. Confusing the two overstates a link's capacity by seven per cent, which in a capacity plan is the difference between adequate and insufficient.
In octets a gibibit per second is 134,217,728, or 128 mebioctets per second. That is close to the throughput of a fast mechanical hard drive and well below a modern solid-state drive, so it sits at the point where storage and internal buses meet and where matching their rates becomes a design question.
Benchmark tools are the commonest place to see the unit written correctly. A memory bandwidth test that allocates buffers in powers of two and measures how long they take to traverse naturally reports in gibibits or gibioctets per second, and a well-written tool says so explicitly rather than rounding to the decimal unit.
The reason to insist on the distinction here rather than lower down the scale is arithmetic. At the kibibit the gap was 2.4 per cent and could be ignored; here it is nearly a thirteenth, and it grows by a further 2.4 per cent at every step above. Getting into the habit at this level costs nothing and avoids compounding errors later.
One gibibit per second equals 1,073,741,824 bits per second, 134,217,728 octets per second, or about 1.074 gigabits per second.