| Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exaoctet per second | 0.00677626357803 Zibit/s |
| 2 Exaoctets per second | 0.0135525271561 Zibit/s |
| 3 Exaoctets per second | 0.0203287907341 Zibit/s |
| 4 Exaoctets per second | 0.0271050543121 Zibit/s |
| 5 Exaoctets per second | 0.0338813178902 Zibit/s |
| 10 Exaoctets per second | 0.0677626357803 Zibit/s |
| 20 Exaoctets per second | 0.135525271561 Zibit/s |
| 25 Exaoctets per second | 0.169406589451 Zibit/s |
| 50 Exaoctets per second | 0.338813178902 Zibit/s |
| 100 Exaoctets per second | 0.677626357803 Zibit/s |
| Reference | Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 7 × 10-15 Eo/s | 4.74338 × 10-17 Zibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.25 × 10-11 Eo/s | 8.47033 × 10-14 Zibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.25 × 10-10 Eo/s | 8.47033 × 10-13 Zibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 3.125 × 10-12 Eo/s | 2.11758 × 10-14 Zibit/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 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.