| Exbioctets (Eio) | Yobibits (Yibit) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet | 0.00000762939453125 Yibit |
| 2 Exbioctets | 0.0000152587890625 Yibit |
| 3 Exbioctets | 0.0000228881835938 Yibit |
| 4 Exbioctets | 0.000030517578125 Yibit |
| 5 Exbioctets | 0.0000381469726562 Yibit |
| 10 Exbioctets | 0.0000762939453125 Yibit |
| 20 Exbioctets | 0.000152587890625 Yibit |
| 25 Exbioctets | 0.000190734863281 Yibit |
| 50 Exbioctets | 0.000381469726562 Yibit |
| 100 Exbioctets | 0.000762939453125 Yibit |
| Reference | Exbioctets (Eio) | Yobibits (Yibit) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.38778 × 10-16 Eio | 1.05879 × 10-21 Yibit |
| A three-minute MP3 | 2.60209 × 10-12 Eio | 1.98523 × 10-17 Yibit |
| A smartphone photo | 3.46945 × 10-12 Eio | 2.64698 × 10-17 Yibit |
| A high-definition film | 0.00000000346945 Eio | 2.64698 × 10-14 Yibit |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 0.0000000433681 Eio | 3.30872 × 10-13 Yibit |
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 yobibit is a unit of digital information equal to two to the eightieth power bits, which is 1,024 zebibits. Its symbol is Yibit. It is the largest of the binary prefixes defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission, and the binary counterpart of the yottabit.
At this step the two conventions differ by 20.9 per cent. That gap is the culmination of the argument for the binary prefixes: a naming habit that was 2.4 per cent wrong at the kibibit is now a fifth wrong, which no engineering document can tolerate. The IEC series stops here because the decimal series stopped at yotta when it was defined in 1998.
When the metric system gained ronna and quetta in 2022, the binary series was not extended to match. There are no accepted names above yobi, so a quantity of two to the ninetieth bits has no short form and must be written out. This is a gap in the system that will presumably be filled when someone needs it, though at present nothing comes close.
A yobibit is 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 octets, or 128 zebioctets. The world's entire stock of data is somewhere in the low hundreds of zettaoctets, which is a fraction of a per cent of a yobioctet. Nothing at this scale has been built, is being built, or is presently planned.
The unit is nevertheless properly defined, and that completeness has a purpose. A measurement system whose rules run out at a certain size forces every future user to invent an extension, and competing extensions are how ambiguity begins. Defining the whole ladder in advance costs nothing and prevents that.
For anyone reading technical documents, the practical lesson of the whole binary series is the lowercase i. Kibit, Mibit, Gibit, Tibit, Pibit, Eibit, Zibit and Yibit are binary; kbit, Mbit, Gbit, Tbit, Pbit, Ebit, Zbit and Ybit are decimal; and the difference between them grows from negligible to a fifth as you climb. A writer who omits the i has left the reader to guess.
One yobibit equals 1,024 zebibits, 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 octets, or about 1.209 yottabits.