| Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Zettabits per second (Zbit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gibioctet per second | 8.589934592 × 10-12 Zbit/s |
| 2 Gibioctets per second | 1.7179869184 × 10-11 Zbit/s |
| 3 Gibioctets per second | 2.5769803776 × 10-11 Zbit/s |
| 4 Gibioctets per second | 3.4359738368 × 10-11 Zbit/s |
| 5 Gibioctets per second | 4.294967296 × 10-11 Zbit/s |
| 10 Gibioctets per second | 8.589934592 × 10-11 Zbit/s |
| 20 Gibioctets per second | 1.7179869184 × 10-10 Zbit/s |
| 25 Gibioctets per second | 2.147483648 × 10-10 Zbit/s |
| 50 Gibioctets per second | 4.294967296 × 10-10 Zbit/s |
| 100 Gibioctets per second | 8.589934592 × 10-10 Zbit/s |
| Reference | Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Zettabits per second (Zbit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.00000651926 Gio/s | 5.6 × 10-17 Zbit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0116415 Gio/s | 1 × 10-13 Zbit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.116415 Gio/s | 1 × 10-12 Zbit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.00291038 Gio/s | 2.5 × 10-14 Zbit/s |
The gibioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,073,741,824 octets per second, which is 1,024 mebioctets per second. Its symbol is Gio/s. It is the unit of memory bandwidth and of the fastest storage interfaces, and the binary counterpart of the gigaoctet per second, from which it differs by 7.4 per cent.
Memory is where the unit belongs most naturally. A memory channel transfers a fixed number of octets per clock cycle, and that number is a power of two, so the resulting bandwidth is a binary multiple of the clock frequency. A machine with several channels reaches tens of gibioctets per second, and an accelerator with stacked memory reaches thousands.
Storage has caught up. A fast solid-state drive on the current interface sustains several gibioctets per second, which means that for the first time the drive and the memory are within an order of magnitude of each other. That convergence has changed how software is written: the old assumption that reading from disc is thousands of times slower than reading from memory no longer holds.
The unit appears in benchmark output, in system monitoring displays and in the specifications of processor interconnects. All of these count in binary because the structures they measure are binary, and reporting the result with a decimal prefix would introduce a seven per cent error for the sake of a familiar-looking label.
For a sense of what the rate means, one gibioctet per second copies a two-gigaoctet film in under two seconds and fills a one-teraoctet drive in about a quarter of an hour. Anything at this speed is faster than every external connection in an ordinary building, so the limiting factor moves inside the machine.
The distinction from the decimal unit matters most in procurement and capacity planning. A specification that requires 10 gigaoctets per second and a system that delivers 10 gibioctets per second are not the same, and the difference of 7.4 per cent is the sort of margin that decides whether a design meets its requirement.
One gibioctet per second equals 1,073,741,824 octets per second, 1,024 mebioctets per second, or about 1.074 gigaoctets per second.
The zettabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand exabits per second. Its symbol is Zbit/s. No system on Earth moves data at this rate, and none is planned; the unit exists because the metric system defines every prefix for every unit, whether or not the combination has yet been needed.
To see how far off it is, take the whole internet. Global traffic at present runs at roughly one exabit per second on average, so the entire planet's communications would have to grow a thousandfold to reach one zettabit per second. At the growth rates of the last two decades that would take somewhere between twenty and thirty years, which is precisely the sort of extrapolation that has been wrong in both directions before.
A zettabit per second is 125 exaoctets per second. Since global data storage manufacturing runs at a few hundred exaoctets a year, a link at this rate would transfer the world's entire annual production of new storage capacity in a couple of seconds. Nothing could be stored at the far end; the data would have to be processed and discarded as it arrived.
That last point is not as fanciful as it sounds. Several existing systems already discard almost everything they receive: particle detectors, radio telescope arrays and network monitoring systems all process far more than they keep, because keeping it is impossible and unnecessary. A zettabit-per-second link would be an extreme case of an architecture that already exists.
The physical obstacles are less absolute than they might appear. The theoretical capacity of a single optical fibre is far above what is used today, and the practical limits come from amplifier noise, non-linear effects and the electronics at each end rather than from the glass itself. Aggregating enough fibres would reach a zettabit per second; the difficulty is that nobody has a reason to.
For a converter, the unit matters because forecasts and capacity models are written in whatever unit keeps the numbers legible. A projection that reaches into the 2050s may reasonably state totals in zettabits per second, and a reader needs to be able to convert that into something familiar.
One zettabit per second equals 1,000 exabits per second, 125 exaoctets per second, or about 0.8470 zebibits per second.