| Petaoctets (Po) | Exbioctets (Eio) |
|---|---|
| 1 Petaoctet | 0.000867361737988 Eio |
| 2 Petaoctets | 0.00173472347598 Eio |
| 3 Petaoctets | 0.00260208521397 Eio |
| 4 Petaoctets | 0.00346944695195 Eio |
| 5 Petaoctets | 0.00433680868994 Eio |
| 10 Petaoctets | 0.00867361737988 Eio |
| 20 Petaoctets | 0.0173472347598 Eio |
| 25 Petaoctets | 0.0216840434497 Eio |
| 50 Petaoctets | 0.0433680868994 Eio |
| 100 Petaoctets | 0.0867361737988 Eio |
| Reference | Petaoctets (Po) | Exbioctets (Eio) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.6 × 10-13 Po | 1.38778 × 10-16 Eio |
| A three-minute MP3 | 0.000000003 Po | 2.60209 × 10-12 Eio |
| A smartphone photo | 0.000000004 Po | 3.46945 × 10-12 Eio |
| A high-definition film | 0.000004 Po | 0.00000000346945 Eio |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 0.00005 Po | 0.0000000433681 Eio |
The petaoctet is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand teraoctets, or a million gigaoctets. Its symbol is Po. It is the unit of institutional storage: the scale at which data belongs to an organisation rather than to a person, and at which keeping it becomes a budget line rather than an afterthought.
A petaoctet is roughly the storage of a thousand large consumer hard drives, or the text of every book ever published several times over. In video terms it is about twenty thousand hours in ultra-high definition, or two and a half years of continuous viewing. The entire catalogue of a large streaming service, held once at each quality level, comes to a few petaoctets.
Science reached this scale first. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN records tens of petaoctets a year after its trigger systems have already discarded more than 99.99 per cent of what the detectors see, and the full archive runs to several hundred petaoctets. Astronomy, genomics and climate modelling all keep archives of comparable size, and the discipline of managing them became a research field of its own.
Commercially the petaoctet describes a single data centre's storage rather than a company's total. A large organisation holds tens or hundreds of petaoctets across many sites, and the largest cloud providers hold exaoctets. At this size the practical problems are not capacity but the electricity to keep the drives spinning, the cooling, and the certainty that a fraction of the hardware is failing at any moment.
That last point drives the design. In a petaoctet array, drive failures are not exceptional events but a continuous background rate, so the system is built to lose devices constantly and rebuild without interruption. Data is stored with erasure coding across many machines, and no single copy of anything is trusted.
Reading a petaoctet is itself a problem. Even at ten gigaoctets per second, a rate few systems sustain, a full pass takes more than a day. This is why analysis at this scale is designed to move the computation to the data rather than the data to the computation, an inversion that shaped the whole field of distributed processing.
One petaoctet equals 1,000 teraoctets, 1,000,000 gigaoctets, 8 petabits, or about 0.8882 pebioctets.
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.